TEN YEARS AGO, OR LESS, THERE WAS MORE PUBLIC CONFIDENCE (IN OUR WESTERN CULTURE) THAT THERE WAS SUCH A THING AS ‘THE TRUTH’.

 

THAT IS, THERE HAS BEEN CONFIDENCE THAT THERE IS “TRUTH” AND THAT IT’S JUST A MATTER OF KEEPING AN OPEN MIND AND DOING SUFFICIENT ‘INVESTIGATIONS’ TO DISCOVER ‘THE TRUTH’.

 

OF COURSE, NIETZSCHE, AMONG OTHERS, INSISTED THAT THERE WAS NO SUCH THING AS ‘THE TRUTH’ AND I GET THE POINT, having been interested for a long while in Goedel’s Theorem of the INCOMPLETEMENT of all FINITE SYSTEMS OF PROPOSITIONS.

 

It only makes sense, being that we are included in a transforming relational continuum, there are no FIXED LOCAL AND EXPLICIT ‘NUGGETS OF TRUTH’.

 

Our personal experience is UNIQUE so that TRUTH is not the TRUTH that most people talk about.  We talk about ‘the TRUTH ABOUT WHAT IS GOING ON IN THE UKRAINE’.  The versions of TRUTH coming from RUSSIA and CHINA differ radically from the versions of TRUTH coming from the U.S. and NATO countries.

 

We are familiar, from knowledge of prior Wartime periods that many things that were presented as ‘the TRUTH’ were NOT THE TRUTH. And even with the passage of many years, it is not as if “THE TRUTH’ finally ‘floats to the surface’.

 

There is a problem with TRUTH as a GENERALIZATION since everyone is experience things uniquely.  If we want to get to something which approaches a ‘general truth’ it seems as if we have to bring many different accounts of experience into a collective confluence and capture the COHERENCIES in the confluence.

 

This is effectively what the indigenous aboriginal LEARNING CIRCLE is all about.

 

As for us WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS, we continue to employ the age-old WESTERN CULTURE method described by Lafontaine; i.e. “La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure”  (Reason (truth) of the most powerful is always the best’).

 

The LEARNING CIRCLE approach to the ‘truth’ is also suggested by Nietzsche;

 

There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; the more affects we are able to put into words about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’.– Nietzsche

This problem of ‘getting hung up’ on accepting an ‘individual perspective’ as ‘the TRUTH’ was also the point in Ivan Illich’s essay Silence is a Commons’ where he suggests that the invention of the loudspeaker (electronic communications in general) opens the way to the distortion that ‘what is established as ‘the TRUTH’ will be highly correlated with whatever is made popular on the major broadcast networks.

 

Not everyone makes a broad sampling of reporting sources but many people have their ‘trusted sources’ and knowingly seek biased reporting that matches their personal biases of conservative or liberal or national or ethnic  or gender based (biased) REPORTING.   The conservative knows she cannot trust liberal news reporting so instead of continuing to go through the exercise of cross comparing liberal and conservative news, she may simply opt to accept only the conservative reporting input and to accept that as ‘the TRUTH’ or the best approximation to it.

 

SO FAR I HAVE ONLY ALLUDED TO THE SUPERFICIAL ASPECTS OF “TRUTH” which many of us would associate with the BINARY LOGIC concept of EITHER truth OR falsehood, however, BINARY LOGIC is a kind of machine for manufacturing OVER-SIMPLIFICATIONS (LIES) and this, to me, OVERSHADOWS the issue of TRUTH OR LIES where the material we are assessing is BINARY LOGIC based material of the type; ‘X is telling the truth’ while ‘Y is telling lies’.  This is a BINARY LOGIC “EITHER/OR’ proposition which needs to be considered in the light of Goedel’s Theorem of the Incompleteness of all finite logical propositions’.

 

It is valuable to understand as much of this as possible since it is very easy to get fooled when we don’t.

 

The easiest way to deal with these mess where there are SO MANY WAYS TO BE MISINFORMED is to avoid single sourcing, which is where Nietzsche was going with his ‘omni-perspectival’ recommendation and also where the indigenous aboriginal ‘LEARNING CIRCLE’ takes us.

 

This is very counter-cultural understanding for us WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS because we grow up hearing things that are said in our JUSTICE SYSTEM where witnesses are asked to SWEAR to TELL THE TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH.  Meanwhile, we have Nietzsche telling us that;

 

 

“What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors – in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all…” – Nietzsche  (On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense’)

 

No wonder the indigenous aboriginal call their Learning circles Healing circles because they don’t believe there is a hope in hell of coming up with such an abstract result ss the TRUTH when each person is understood NOT AS THE LOCAL AUTHOR OF THEIR OWN ACTIONS but as CONDUIT or LIGHTNING ROD for RELATIONAL TENSIONS that develop within the dynamics of the social collective.  NO WAY IS THE INDIVIDUAL THE “LOCAL AUTHOR” OF HIS OWN ACTIONS.

 

I am just saying Modern physics also says, and what makes sense if we reflect on our actual sense-experience of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum aka the WAVE-FIELD aka the Tao.   In simple terms, IT IS ONLY THE DOUBLE ERROR OF NAMING AND GRAMMAR THAT FABRICATES THE BOGUS NOTION OF “LOCAL AUTHORING’ OF ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS.

 

As David Bohm and others have pointed out, the indigenous aboriginals are right on target with their understanding that we share inclusion in a complex matrix of relational dynamics and what COMES THROUGH US does not ORIGINATE WITHIN US.  A moment’s reflection will reaffirm that.   It is a WESTERN CULTURE TRADITION to use language that SIMPLIFIES things and it simplifies by way of the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR which imputes the POWER OF LOCAL AUTHORING.  We even do it using the NAMES of things like NATIONS or TOWNS; e.g. ‘the TOWN IS GROWING, DEVELOPING and PRODUCING goods services.

THIS IS NONSENSE!.   The indigenous aboriginal languages, supported also by Modern physics, make this claim; ‘THERE IS TOWNING IN THE TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE’.   There is NO “TOWN-THING” there which is the LOCAL AUTHOR of ITS OWN GROWTH, DEVELOPMENT AND PRODUCTION!, … that is one of those BINARY LOGIC based SIMPLIFICATIONS that comes with the LANGUAGE ARCHITECTURE we WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS have designed.

The whole LANDSCAPE is alive with activity and there is CLUSTERING of people and building in spots within the transforming relational continuum but EVERYTHING IS IN FLUX, and sure, we can pin a NAME on a flow-feature like a GATHERING-SCATTERING focus akin to the CLUSTERING of ants where a drop of honey is inducting a GATHERING-SCATTERING resonance feature, … BUT HOLD ON, to REDEFINE THAT AS “A CLUSTER” and then say stuff like ‘THE CLUSTER IS GROWING LARGER AND MORE ACTIVE’ is to fall into the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR TRAP which imputes LOCAL AUTHORING POWERS to what is a resonance feature in the overall transforming relational continuum.

 

No wonder Bohm has argued for his flow-based language Rheomode because that is going to say the same thing as the indigenous aboriginal language says, that THERE IS CLUSTERING IN THE TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPE.  THERE IS NO “CLUSTER” ; i.e. A LOCAL THING-IN-ITSELF WITH ITS OWN POWERS OF AUTHORING ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENT THAT IS GROWING LARGER, THEN SMALLER, THEN LARGER AGAIN.  What we are looking at is a RESONANCE BASED GATHERING-SCATTERING DYNAMIC akin to DUNING in the DESERT.   SURE, LANGUAGE “LETS US SAY” “THE DUNE IS GROWING LARGER AND IS SHIFTING TO THE SOUTH’, which is the portrait of something LOCAL and EXPLICIT, notionally with ITS OWN POWERS OF AUTHORING ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENT, but we know that that is what Nietzsche is calling the DOUBLE ERROR OF NAMING AND GRAMMAR which has us SUPERIMPOSING on the NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT resonance pattern, A LOCAL AND EXPLICIT THING, notionally with ITS OWN POWERS OF AUTHORING ACTIONS and DEVELOPMENT.

 

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LETS BE HONEST!  WHAT WE ARE DOING HERE IS CONSTRUCTING AN ABSTRACT SIMPLIFIED “SUBSTITUTE REALITY” in place of the transforming relational continuum aka the WAVE-FIELD aka the Tao.  The INDEPENDENT STATE IS NOTHING OTHER THAN THE DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR based LOCAL AUTHOR of actions and developments.  This NOTION is something we SUBSTITUTE for what is really going on which is the transforming relational continuum; i.e. a world characterized by global interconnectedness and mutual interdependence.. In other words;

 

“The above aphorism (The Name of the Devil is Suboptimization’), attributed to Kenneth Boulding, points to the inherent weakness characterizing the mindset and socio‐economic, political, educational and managerial practices of Western Industrial society as it developed over the past 300 years. It has its basis in the analytic‐reductionistic scientific paradigm, which, despite the remarkable technological applications it spawned, is inappropriate, conflict‐generating and dysfunctional in a world characterized by global interconnectedness and mutual interdependence …” — György Jaros and Martine Dodds-Taljaard  (International Society of Systems Sciences)

 

Are the NATO ‘independent nations’ going to buy into this?  NOT YET! and neither is RUSSIA because we continue to play this game of BELIEVING IN LOCAL GROWTH, DEVELOPMENT and PRODUCTION that has been hatched by  “ the mindset and socio‐economic, political, educational and managerial practices of Western Industrial society as it developed over the past 300 years.

 

I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE THINKING: … IF THIS IS TRUE, OUR WESTERN CULTURE SOCIETY, WHICH HAS HEARD ALL THIS BEFORE FROM “CHIEF SEATTLE” AND OTHERS,  IS NOT READY TO OWN UP TO IT!

 

YES, I AGREE!  BUT WHAT IS BEING CLAIMED HERE BY THOSE SYSTEMS SCIENCES RESEARCHERS OVERLAYS WHAT BOHM ALSO CLAIMS;

 

1 FRAGMENTATION AND WHOLENESS (from Wholeness and the Implicate Order by David Bohm)

The title of this chapter is ‘Fragmentation and wholeness’. It is especially important to consider this question today, for fragmentation is now very widespread, not only throughout society, but also in each individual; and this is leading to a kind of general confusion of the mind, which creates an endless series of problems and interferes with our clarity of perception so seriously as to prevent us from being able to solve most of them.

Thus art, science, technology, and human work in general, are divided up into specialities, each considered to be separate in essence from the others. Becoming dissatisfied with this state of affairs, men have set up further interdisciplinary subjects, which were intended to unite these specialities, but these new subjects have ultimately served mainly to add further separate fragments. Then, society as a whole has developed in such a way that it is broken up into separate nations and different religious, political, economic, racial groups, etc. Man’s natural environment has correspondingly been seen as an aggregate of separately existent parts, to be exploited by different groups of people. Similarly, each individual human being has been fragmented into a large number of separate and conflicting compartments, according to his different desires, aims, ambitions, loyalties, psychological characteristics, etc., to such an extent that it is generally accepted that some degree of neurosis is inevitable, while many individuals going beyond the ‘normal’ limits of fragmentation are classified as paranoid, schizoid, psychotic, etc

 

WE CAN SEE THE SYMPTOMS.  THE PARANOIA OVER COVID 19 WHICH IS, IN QUANTUM LOGIC TERMS, IMBALANCE.  THAT’S ALL!  NOT ‘THE ATTACK OF A PATHOGEN’. THE NOTION OF A PATHOGEN IS BINARY LOGIC BASED ABSTRACTION.  THERE IS NO PATHOGEN!  PATHOGENS DO NOT EXIST.  WE CREATE THEM AS MENTAL IMPRESSIONS.

 

NEXT PATHOGEN; ‘RUSSIA!’

 

HEY, I DID NOT SAY THAT THE RUSSIANS WERE ALL NICE PEOPLE, MY POINT IS THAT WE ARE ALL INCLUDED IN THE ONE WEB OF LIFE AND SOMETIMES IMBALANCE AND RELATIONAL DISSONANCE ERUPTS WITHIN IT, AND THE REMEDY FOR THAT IS TO WORK TO RESTORE BALANCE AND RESONANCE (HARMONY).

 

The indigenous aboriginal understanding of the fallacy of LOCAL AUTHORING (THE DOUBLE ERROR OF NAMING AND GRAMMAR)  is captured in the Peacemaker myth.

 

In the Peacemaker myth of the Iroquois, the peacemaker, Dekanawideh, does not seek to overthrow or exterminate the evil Adodarho, but to meet and find reconciliation through mutually influencing relational transformation that subsumes polarizing tensions.  Finding the hidden harmony in opposites is the mystery of the bow and the lyre in the teaching of Heraclitus;

Hodos ano kato (ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω), “the upward-downward path.” are simultaneous opposites, the source of “hidden harmony”. There is a harmony in the bending back (παλίντροπος palintropos) as in the case of the bow and the lyre. – from Heraclitus

 

In the relational understanding of the world, there are no PATHOGENS.  PATHOGENS are the artifacts of SIMPLISTIC BINARY LOGIC coupled with the DOUBLE ERROR of NAMING and GRAMMAR which imputes LOCAL AUTHORING.

 

COVID 19 is a proliferating microbe and that proliferation stems from IMBALANCE in the microbial assemblage and REBALANCING is the REMEDY as has been demonstrated with FECAL MICROBIOTA TRANSPLANTATION which is also the REBALANCER used to remediate C. DIFFICILE proliferation associated with COLITIS.

 

NO, I AM NOT ‘WANDERING OFF TOPIC’.  THIS IS EXACTLY THE SAME TOPIC.  IT IS REVIEWING HOW WE WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS HAVE GOT INTO THE HABIT OF USING BINARY LOGIC (AS IN WESTERN ANTI-PATHOGEN MEDICAL AND JUSTICE APPROACHES).  SURE, IF THERE IS A RICH AND POOR IMBALANCE PROBLEM AND A PROLIFERATION OF THIEVES EMERGES, THE ANTI-PATHOGEN APPROACH OF HIRING MORE POLICE MAY BE A SUPERFICIAL FIX, BUT THAT DOESN’T RESOLVE THE IMBALANCE WHICH IS THE ROOT AUTHORING AGENCY SO WE CAN EXPECT A SUCCESSION OF NEW VARIANT ‘REBALANCERS’ (MIS-IDENTIFIED AS ‘PATHOGENS’) SO LONG AS THE IMBALANCE IS NOT ATTENDED TO.

 

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In the Peacemaker myth of the Iroquois, the peacemaker, Dekanawideh, does not seek to overthrow or exterminate the evil Adodarho, but to meet and find reconciliation through a mutually influencing relational transformation that subsumes polarizing tensions.

HEY, THAT ONLY MAKES SENSE SINCE MODERN PHYSICS CLAIMS THAT ‘WE ARE ALL RELATED’ IN THE SAME SENSE AS THE INDIGENOUS ABORIGINAL ‘MITAKUYE OYASIN’.   WE ARE ALL RELATED BECAUSE WE ARE ALL INCLUDED IN THE ‘GREAT WEB OF LIFE’ OR IN MODERN PHYSICS TERMS WE ARE ALL INCLUDED AS CONDENSATIONS IN THE ONE ALL-INCLUDING ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVE-FIELD.

 

AS FOR THIS NOTION OF ‘INDEPENDENT BEINGS’ AND ‘INDEPENDENT NATIONS’, IT IS A ‘FLAT-SPACE ABSTRACTION’.  BUT WE DON’T ‘REALLY’ LIVE IN A FLAT SPACE OF INFINITE EXTENT, THAT WAS JUST SOMETHING THAT COPERNICUS THOUGHT OF TO SIMPLIFY THE REPRESENTATION OF PLANETARY MOVEMENT;

 

And just as our Copernicus said to us : It is more convenient to suppose the earth turns round, since thus the laws of astronomy are expressible in a much simpler language ; this one would say: It is more convenient to suppose the earth turns round, since thus the laws of mechanics are expressible in a much simpler language’. Henri Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis’, Ch. VII Relative Motion and Absolute Motion

 

CAN YOU IMAGINE HOW DIFFICULT IT WOULD BE TO PORTRAY THE ‘HARMONIES OF THE WORLD’ AS KEPLER DESCRIBED WITHOUT INVENTING AN ABSOLUTE FIXED EMPTY AND INFINITE RECTANGULAR PSEUDO-SPACE TO DIAGRAM PLANETARY POSITIONS AND MOVEMENTS, … AND I HAVEN’T EVEN MENTIONED THE ‘COMPLICATION’ THAT THE PLANETS ARE CONDENSATIONS OF THE ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELD AND ‘ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELD’ ‘DOES NOT COME IN RECTANGULAR BOXES’ … DUH…

 

SO WHERE ARE WE TODAY.  THE ABSTRACT NOTION OF THE ‘INDEPENDENT NATION’ CAME ALONG AND EVERYBODY TRIED TO JUMP ON THAT BANDWAGON BUT HOW CAN YOU HAVE AN ‘INDEPENDENT NATION’ IN A SPHERICAL SPACE?  YOU CAN’T.  HOW ABOUT IN A RECTANGULAR SPACE OF INFINITE EXTENT?  OK, .. BUT WHO IS GOING TO MANAGE THE CLASH BETWEEN PRETENDING THAT NATIONS ARE INDEPENDENT AND THE REALITY THAT WE LIVE  in a world characterized by global interconnectedness and mutual interdependence …”;

 

WE SAY THAT EACH NATION IS NOT ONLY INDEPENDENT BUT IS CAPABLE OF AUTHORING ITS OWN ACTIONS AND DEVELOPMENTS.  WE CAN SAY THAT BECAUSE WE HAVE LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR AND BECAUSE WE WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS ENGINEERED INTO THE LANGUAGE (ALTHOUGH NOT THE REALITY) THE LOCAL AUTHORING CAPABILITY, USING THE DOUBLE ERROR OF NAMING AND GRAMMAR.   THIS MEANS THAT WE CAN HAVE A JUSTICE SYSTEM THAT HOLDS EACH INDEPENDENT NATION LIABLE FOR “THEIR OWN” ACTIONS.

 

CAN YOU IMAGINE WHAT WE WOULD BE FACED WITH IF WE WENT ALONG WITH THE INDIGENOUS ABORIGINALS AND MODERN PHYSICS?  YES, YOU’RE RIGHT, WE WOULD HAVE TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT “WE LIVE IN A WORLD CHARACTERIZED BY GLOBAL INTERCONNECTEDNESS AND MUTUAL INTERDEPENDENCE”, … A VIRTUAL ‘WEB-OF-LIFE’ SITUATION, RIGHT OUT OF CHIEF SEATTLE’S SPEECH.

 

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AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT:

 

I DID WANT TO USE AN APHORISM THAT SOMEONE FAMOUS USED, BUT WHO NOBODY LIKES TO RECALL, A CERTAIN FELLOW WITH THE INITIALS “A. H.”  WHAT HE SAID WAS THAT IF YOU MAKE A LIE BIG ENOUGH, ORDINARY FOLKS WILL NOT HAVE THE TEMERITY TO CHALLENGE IT, AND HE MADE USE OF THAT FOR HIS OWN PERSONAL POWER ROMP.   WELL, ANOTHER FELLOW WITH THE INITIALS ‘D. T.’ GOT ON BOARD THAT ONE AND THAT PRACTICE IS NOW IN ITS HEY-DAY WITH NO END IN SIGHT.

 

THE INDIGENOUS ABORIGINAL REMEDY IS THE LEARNING CIRCLE WHEREIN THE ‘TALKING STICK’ IS PASSED AND EACH PERSON GETS TO ‘SPEAK FROM THE HEART’ (THIS IS NOT ABOUT INTELLECTUAL STRATEGIES, BUT ABOUT LIFE’S SENSORY EXPERIENCE).   OF COURSE WE NEED TO BE ALL-INCLUSIVE IN THE CIRCLE SO THAT MEANS INCLUDING ADODARHO AS WELL AS DEKANAWIDEH, AND WHAT IS TO BE SHARED IS FROM-THE-HEART PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND NOT SOME PERSONAL INTELLECTUAL ASSESSMENT OF ‘WHAT’S GOING ON OUT THERE’.

 

SO, THIS HAS BEEN A BRIEF SUMMARY OF ‘WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE TRUTH’, ALONG WITH SOME REMEDIAL SUGGESTIONS.

 

 

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