Though it is unlikely to show in the body of writing in these APN pages, I have been drawn to Barack Obama\u2019s innate \u2018potentials\u2019. \u00a0However, my impression from before he ran for president was that he was applying himself in the wrong place. \u00a0\u00a0As an \u2018American\u2019 in a world leadership position, YES, … but as an ‘American leader’ positioning the world, NO.<\/p>\n
‘Wag-the-dog leadership’:\u00a0 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,\u00a0 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\u00a0 (in wag-the-dog leadership, the leader is the CAUSE\u00a0 of the collective dynamic).<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
From the viewpoint of aboriginal physics, the Western culture believes it lives in a flat space [rectangular, Euclidean space] rather than in a curved space.\u00a0 The basic difference in living in a curved space that could have been pointed out by any aboriginal traditionalist, but in a manner that appeals more directly to nature, was pointed out by Einstein in his lecture \u2018Geometry and Experience\u2019.\u00a0 In rectangular space, the notion in the mind is that you can keep piling blocks up in the space, in the x-y plane (a floor or flat horizontal plane) and then pile them up vertically like pillars, and you can keep expanding the flat surface area of the floor and the height (and depth) of the pillars FOREVER not only without ever filling up the space but without ever feeling like you are even getting close to it.<\/p>\n
This is not the case in curved space.\u00a0 As Einstein point out, in curved space (more like the space we live in), our experience is as if we were tiling the surface of a sphere with circular disks.\u00a0 The more disks we put on the surface, the fuller it gets until what Einstein referred to as the \u2018reciprocal disposition\u2019 (the complement to the positive space of the tiling disks) exerts a resistive backpressure against our continued tiling.\u00a0 The finding is not simply that the curved space is finite and can \u2018get full\u2019, but that \u2018filling-in-area\u2019 is always in reciprocal, complementary relation with the \u2018area being filled in\u2019.<\/p>\n
If one is used to thinking in terms of rectangular space, this confounds them mind.\u00a0 For example, it is common for us to speak of the \u2018civilized areas\u2019 and the \u2018wilderness\u2019 as if they are two different areas (mutually exclusive).\u00a0 Imagine the king whose kingdom is growing and he has to keep expanding the walls of his kingdom and pushing them out farther and father into the wilderness.\u00a0 In a rectangular space, he can keep doing this indefinitely.\u00a0 But in a curved space there is \u2018resistance\u2019 or \u2018backpressure\u2019 due to \u2018reciprocal disposition\u2019.\u00a0 \u00a0The more he pushes out his walls, the more vicious the wolves and bears become.\u00a0 As he looks overs the invoices for the construction costs of his expanding walls, he notices something curious; i.e. the invoices are decreasing.\u00a0 When he questions his wizier, the wizier hands him some binoculars and invites him to come climb up on the wall and have a look.\u00a0 To the king\u2019s surprise, he can see all of the circular walls around his kingdom and what he was calling the \u2018wilderness\u2019 OUTSIDE of his kingdom walls is now fully contained INSIDE of the now-small circular \u2018wilderness\u2019 area about one mile in diameter.\u00a0 \u00a0NOW, as he looks down at the \u2018savages\u2019 shaking their fists at him and the snarling animals, he understands why the creatures of the wilderness were becoming increasingly nasty and why the invoices for the kingdom circular surrounding walls, which had been continually expanding in diameter, had been decreasing.\u00a0 BECAUSE this is what happens in a curved space and he had been assuming that his kingdom was in a rectangular space.<\/p>\n
So, what\u2019s this go to do with Obama and the US Presidency?<\/p>\n
Inside the expanding \u2018empire\u2019, everything may be great, but IN A CURVED SPACE, simultaneous and reciprocally complementary to the \u2018improving conditions\u2019 inside the empire, the opposite (in some fashion or another) is occurring; i.e. we do not live in an \u2018infinite space\u2019 wherein we can claim that our living area is \u2018independent\u2019 of the rest.<\/p>\n
Now the king and the people of the expanding kingdom were \u2018good people\u2019 and they wanted \u2018the best\u2019 for everyone, and they thought; \u2018if the others work hard like us, and educate their children and are clever, inventive and industrious like us, then they too will be able to enjoy what we now do. \u00a0This is implicit in our \u2018Declaration of Independence\u2019 and our \u2018Constitution\u2019 which specifies that everyone is entitled to own property and to pursue their self-interests to that they may be happy and fulfilled\u2019.<\/p>\n
No, this is confusing \u2018idealisation\u2019 for \u2018reality\u2019 (space is not really rectangular, … it has the same characteristics as curved space, so that the notion of an area\/kingdom that is \u2018independent\u2019 is delusionary nonsense.<\/p>\n
Therefore, the king must represent the people OUTSIDE THE WALLS at the same time as he is representing the people INSIDE THE WALLS; i.e. he must be impartial in his leadership rather than \u2018loyal\u2019 to those inside the walls, who are really joined-at-the-hip with those outside the walls.<\/p>\n
Now Obama seemed like a person who wanted to lead in a manner that represented, with impartiality, the people on both the outside and the inside of the walls.<\/p>\n
But there is obviously a problem here if the people inside the walls, who elected him, believe that they are living in a rectangular space, because nothing he has said in his running for election questions the basic premises of the western worldview.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, taking counsel from military strategists is not a good idea since they, above all, impose a mutually excluding distinction on those who are outsiders (the\u2019enemy\u2019) and those who are \u2018insiders\u2019 (\u2018friends\u2019), so that their approach and their training and their strategy ignores this \u2018reciprocal disposition\u2019 based \u2018backpressure\u2019.\u00a0 Their job, as they see it, is to move the friendly front (the kingdom walls) continuously outwards and drive the enemy back.\u00a0 In their communities, they will drive the coyotes out of town, and as the town grows to a city, further and further \u2018out into the wilderness\u2019, and they will do that \u2018independently\u2019 without thinking that there are many circular disks of \u2018community\u2019 and that these are all expanding, setting up a snarling backpressure from the \u2018outsiders\u2019 that, in there view, is due to something internal in those outsiders (i.e. they are becoming increasingly evil, both in the intensity of their evil and in the frequency of their evil actions).<\/p>\n
Talents like Barack Obama\u2019s need to be deployed in positions with a mandate to represent the insiders and outsiders at the same time, as is required when sharing inclusion in a curved space or, as the aboriginals say, when one is a strand in an interdependent web-of-life.<\/p>\n
So, I guess I have this sense of geometry in me that is providing the \u2018author\u2019s subtext\u2019 for the article on AFGHANISTAN. \u00a0\u00a0That is, Einstein\u2019s lecture was on \u2018Geometry\u2019 AND \u2018Experience\u2019 and experience is the source of one\u2019s understanding of \u2018geometry\u2019. \u00a0In fact Henri Poincar\u00e9 gets into this more deeply than Einstein and, to me, understands it better than Einstein, and when I make this assessment what I am saying is that Poincar\u00e9\u2019s discussion of it \u2018fits better with my experience\u2019 than does Einstein\u2019s discussion of it.<\/p>\n
In any case, the \u2018author\u2019s subtext\u2019 is that we implicitly use some kind of \u2018geometry\u2019 in giving \u2018representation\u2019 to our experience and our western culture has a \u2018standard geometry\u2019 that is \u2018flatspace\u2019 based and that this \u2018flatspace\u2019 is the theatre of operations for a cast of characters understood as \u2018local causal agents\u2019 whose actions and interactions are the cause of the world dynamic. \u00a0This is a nice simple and easy to talk about geometry which is unfortunately far from the truth as given by our experience. \u00a0\u00a0To confuse this \u2018idealisation\u2019 for \u2018reality\u2019 is the source of incoherence and dysfunction in our local and global social dynamic.<\/p>\n
I am already up to 1200 words in this comment, which is the very limit for a comment suggested by \u2018experts\u2019 on internet based communications, so I had better \u2018shut up\u2019.<\/p>\n
In closing this \u2018author\u2019s subtext\u2019 comment, I would just like to reiterate Kepler\u2019s comment that science is in the habit of \u00a0\u201cchoosing not that which is most true but that which is most easy\u201d which means that our science-conditioned habit is to look for brevity and clarity in a comment; i.e. to assume that truth can be encapsulated in brief and clear statements. \u00a0But the trade-off is that the person hearing the comment has to ALREADY have immense knowledge to give sense to the brief and clear comment.<\/p>\n
The \u2018knowledge\u2019 that the person already has is implicit in \u2018the question\u2019 that the \u2018answer\u2019 corresponds to. \u00a0\u00a0That is, if I am rambling on giving the answer to a question you don\u2019t have, then what I am saying isn\u2019t going to be meaningful; i.e. you will look in vain for any meaning in what I am saying. \u00a0This situation is captured in Douglas Adam\u2019s \u2018The Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy\u2019 wherein \u2018the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything\u2019 is delivered by a giant supercomputer called \u2018deep thought\u2019, the answer being \u201842\u2019 which is brief and clear enough, at which point the descendents of the computer\u2019s creators (now long gone) realize that though they now have the ultimate answer in hand, they don’t know the ultimate question.<\/p>\n
So, insofar as one looks for brevity and clarity in the sharing of understanding that purports to give answers to currently puzzling paradoxes, the assumption is that the question is already known and in hand.\u00a0 And, insofar as it might be safer to assume that the question is not known and in hand, the shared understanding then has the job of developing both the question and the answer together and in relation to one another, and this takes quite a few \u2018more words\u2019.<\/p>\n
But, otherwise, the danger is that a brief and clear \u2018curved space answer\u2019 will be interpreted in the context of a \u2018flat-spaced question\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 Another way to say this is; ‘the world that is given by representations of dynamical forms notionally construed as\u00a0 ‘local organisms\/groups, notionally with their own locally originating (internal purposed directed) behaviours, is not the real world of our experience (it is an idealised world based on ‘schaumkommen’ or ‘appearances’).<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Though it is unlikely to show in the body of writing in these APN pages, I have been drawn to Barack Obama\u2019s innate \u2018potentials\u2019. \u00a0However, my impression from before he ran for president was that he was applying himself in the wrong place. \u00a0\u00a0As an \u2018American\u2019 in a world leadership position, YES, … but as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apn","count-0","even alt","author-emile","last"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/goodshare.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/goodshare.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/goodshare.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goodshare.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goodshare.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/goodshare.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":283,"href":"https:\/\/goodshare.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278\/revisions\/283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/goodshare.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goodshare.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goodshare.org\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}