Pender Island, June 11th, 2004
www.goodshare.org/bogipper.htm
Many of us have been troubled by the way the world seems to be going. This is not to say one cannot still experience happiness and love, both within the company of friends and when one is alone in the moment or in the fields, forest, on the ocean.
But why the depression, the suicide, the rise in drug-taking to offset the rising stress of life? Why the rising disillusionment with the workplace, with politics?
This is what I have been working intensively on for a number of years.
Why? I don't know why and it doesn't matter to me. It feels to me that it is a natural vocation to me, as I have wrestled with questions of the 'management' approach of society since my first day in elementary school, and I have never been 'stonewalled' by my own inquiry, ... things have continued to open up to my investigations and my understanding of 'social management' and its pathologies has continued to deepen. Understanding ('eagle learning') comes from a contextual web of thoughts, from a bringing into connection in the mind a multitude of real and imagined experiences, so there is really no way, as the aboriginal peoples of North America point out, to simply 'share' understanding, ... understanding is something that emerges from within through this confluence of coherency and consistency amongst many experiences, deepened by the knowledge sharing of others. The pure transmission of knowledge ('hawk learning'), on the other hand, is something that is accepted 'on trust', such as 'the Earth is the center of the universe' or 'the Sun is the center of the solar system'. People accept such statements on trust and they are non-trivial to work out for oneself. One cannot even say 'the earth turns' since one has to answer the associated question 'relative to what does the Earth turn?' and if the answer is 'space' then one has just imposed the axiom that space is absolute, an eternal, rigid, fixed container.
Most of learning is by accepting knowledge on trust, from respected 'thinkers'. Aristotle's claims that men had more teeth than women and that heavier bodies feel to earth more rapidly than lighter bodies held up without question for over eighteen centuries even though their falsehood could have been readily established, and likely was, but the knowledge of those who contradicted Aristotle was not likely to be accepted on trust, unless it was coming from 'another Aristotle', ... another highly respected 'thinker'. This is the way of 'trust', ... once it is established, it is like a pipeline for all kinds of things, not all of which has a uniform integrity. Who could not trust Ronald Reagan, with his friendly, open and affable personality? The Nicaraguan people could not trust him, nor anyone of a leftist leaning (Reagan approved the bombing of a mosque in Beirut, killing 80 innocent people and missing his political assassination target, and he ordered an airstrike against Libya, killing Muamar Qaddafy's adopted daughter and 36 other innocent citizens. During his Presidency and through his decisions, his country was condemned by the World Court for 'international terrorism', which included the deaths of tens of thousands of Nicaraguans through the US supported 'Contra' attempts to preserve dictatorship iin face of a democratic (but leftist) revolution.)
This love-hate for trusted/distrusted public figures is an 'anomaly' that is very relevant to my 'community-as-complex systems' and I use this example of Reagan, the man and the president, as an introduction of my 'findings', ... which of course, are NOT to 'to be taken on trust' (that would reduce 'understanding' to 'knowledge') but for the purpose, if you are so inspired, of reproducing in the context of your own personal experience.
Let's go a little farther into the personality of Ronald Reagan, back to an era where brothers and sisters were being split apart by their differing views and values in regard to 'social management';i.e. to the pulls between the 'right' - central, hierarchically enforced 'politically correct' social management, ... and the 'left' - 'self-organizing' or 'an-archic' social self-management.
Ask yourself, ... 'how much can I tell about a person from the way he looks and acts and deals with others around him? If he seems like a wonderful person, what does this say about his beliefs and approach to 'social dynamics management'?
Here we see two actors, Ronald Reagan on the left and Humphrey on the right, both of whom were considered, so the story goes, for the role of 'Rick' opposite Ingrid Bergman in the film Casablanca, with Bogart being chosen.
Is there a suggestion here, regardless of the truth of that 'rumour', that while these are both 'really nice guys', that there is something 'different' that comes to us through their 'gestalt' (the total package)?
There is this question of 'authenticity' as in the native chief whose life-experience, immersed in nature, seems somehow to have given him a grounded 'way' that is like that of a mountain or mighty tree, pre-political correctness, ... impervious to transient social pressures, ... coming from somewhere deeper. Wonderful, affable people were nevertheless amongst those who 'went along with' Nazism, and Charles Lindbergh was still supporting Hitler and Nazism AFTER the battle of Britain and the widespread destruction and casualties to the civilian sector that had resulted.
Many wonderful, affable people believe that 'the ends justifies the means'. The wonderful, affable people of the so-called political 'right' in politics believe that that by taking from those who are the so-called 'less-performant' in society (as measured by one's ability to 'make money') and investing this in the so-called 'more-performant', that more money will be made to be shared amongst all of the people, both the 'more-performant' and the 'less-performant', ... whereas, if one tries to equalize the distribution across the 'more-performant' and 'less-performant', there will be less money going to those who have a demonstrated ability to 'make more'; i.e. 'the more-performant'.
Many people of the so-called 'left' do not believe that 'making money' is an appropriate underpinning for a social dynamics management strategy, because 'making money' can also abuse the workers, ... the so-called 'less performant' people without whom, the 'more-performant' could not be 'more-performant'. So, how fair is it to disproportionately empower and allocate a disproportionate share of the 'common wealth' to the 'more-performant' if they are using this inequality of power and share of the common wealth to 'abuse' those without whom they are dependent upon for their privileged classification as members of the class of the 'more-performant'?
Clearly, once the class of the 'more-performant' gain political power, there is a kind of a lock-in, since they have a disproportionate balance of power and wealth and the law is treating everyone as 'equals' and operating on an 'anti-disturbance' basis rather than on an 'anti-abuse-of-power' basis. That is, if a patriarchal society closes down possibility space (opportunity to be gainfully employed and to have the space that makes possible one's authentic development) for women, ... and thus women 'on the bottom' of the more-performant-less-performant pecking order find that the only way that they can survive is through prostitution, this is surely an abuse of power by the 'more-performant' patriarchal crony collective (otherwise known as the democratically elected majority in a politically 'right' society).
Meanwhile the system of law and justice, with its anti-disturbance (peace-keeping) orientation is going to pursue the 'prostitutes' for their criminal behaviour as if 'eliminating prostitutes' equates to 'eliminating prostitution' (or as if 'eliminating terrorists' equates to 'eliminating terrorism') when what is needed is a justice system that guards against the 'abuse of power' rather than 'keeping the peace' and finding itself as a tool of an 'abuse of power' by a patriarchal crony collective that has installed itself in the seat of disproportionate power and wealth and now has as its means to retain its position, the threat of further reducing the apportionment to the so-called 'less-performant' class. Such a threat encourages the co-opting of those making their way up the ladder from the 'less performant' depths to the 'more-performant' heights, since after one has struggled to climb up this ladder, one does not want to see the high rungs now within reach, be levelled by a swing to the politics of 'the left'.
Two wonderful affable people such as Reagan and Bogart can have two very different views about the basis for social dynamics management and there is 'a story' in this that is worth following through to deepen our understanding of 'how the world works' versus 'how our society works'.
The often submerged and out-of-sight split in neighbours embrace of either the politics of the right or the left surfaced 'bigtime' in the 1950's during the 'McCarthy Era', and it brought out a distinguishing difference between two wonderful, affable guys, Reagan and Bogart, which, ... maybe you could 'feel' from their relative gestalts, ... or maybe not, ... in that there was this certain rocky authenticity about Bogart whereupon when he walked into a room, he would be unlikely to project and incite affability as would occur with the back-slapping affability of Reagan, but would wait for it to emerge naturally, the way it wanted to, and if it did not emerge, be respectful that that was the way it was meant to be at that particular time ('to every thing there is a season and time to every purpose).
Nature doesn't make things happen, ... behaviours in nature are 'emergent' and 'self-organizing' and this is how 'diversity is naturally respected'. If it is 'your season' to be a reflective mood or to go on a vision quest, and others keep pushing you to 'join in the party', this amounts to 'paternalism' on their part, however well intentioned. It is this same kind of 'knowledge-based learning' where one seeks to impose the 'correct behaviour' on another. But if you have been close to another who suffers deep depression, you realize that support for the depressed friend is what has more value, ... to assist them in whatever way helps them to rekindle an emergent love and appreciation of life from within. Friendship that expects the reflective person to 'flip into party mood', the 'General Bullmoose' attitude that 'when I'm partying, everybody should be partying' and finally gives up and turns their back on the person in a miserable depression, labelling them as person a 'party-pooper', simply adds to the depression. Natural self-organization implies that the individual participants in the collective respect the moods (behavioural phases/seasons) of others and do not seek to over-ride them. Thus, there seems to be those who manifest an assertive or paternalistic mood-management and those who are respectful of the inner-emerging nature of a moods, who would use assertive affability only as a tool to try to inspire inner emergence based restoring of happiness, but would never personify, on the basis of seasons of moodiness, the person per se as a 'depressive' or as a 'party-pooper'. Here again emerges the geometry of 'knowledge' ('hawk learning') versus 'underderstanding' ('eagle learning'), the radically differing views wherein we (a) 'construct' our behaviour by 'following the trusted affable leader' and 'make the party happen' versus (b) we respect the self-organizing powers of a social collective and support one another through ups and downs, inspiring the joys of emerging harmony but never trying to impose them.
Now to return to the surfacing of this difference in a belief in 'constructing' the social dynamic versus respecting the self-organizing potentials of a social collective, a surfacwould bring out a hidden dimension that distinguishes between two otherwise comparably wonderful, affable guys, 'The Gipper' and 'Bogie' during the McCarthy era;
"Reagan's portrayal of George Gipp in "Knute Rockne, All American" (1940) with its famous line "Win just one for the Gipper..." will probably be his best remembered Hollywood character. The role of 'Rick', [opposite Ingrid Bergman's 'Ilsa' in Casablanca (1942)] might have earned Reagan superstar status and reserved for him a place in the Pantheon, but oddly enough, he earned his place in history as one of America's most popular presidents."
The character 'Rick' in this wartime movie, brought out a cosmopolitan (transnational), humanist side of the American persona, ... the beyond-All American-nationalism and beyond-national-culture authenticity-grounding that characterizes natural humanist love. (Can you feel nostalgia for his other 'gestalt' of American essence that seems in modern times, to be replaced by that of All-American winning?)
A decade later, in the wake of WWII and the defeat of fascism, the demon of 'communism' was rearing its ugly head (though, as many historians have noted, the social management technique of the leftism of Stalin had far more in common with the rightism of Hitler than the leftism of Gandhi). In other words, the 'shadow' that fuelled the upwelling fear of communism, may have had the power it did by the subconscious knowing that this was indeed the way the world worked, that the order in society was contructed by the leadership (the view of the 'right') and thus that communist leadership could infiltrate America and rise up and impose itself on the social collective, ... destroying the lives and status of the 'more performant' class in America. That is, the fear was that 'communists' would impose themselves on the social collective just as the capitalists were imposing themselves on the social collective 'for the good of the people' (an 'ends -justifies-the-means paternalism). Those 'rightists' like Reagan, who believe that this is the only way that human society can work, by paternalistically imposing kindly,caring order on the social collective would not be seeing what 'leftists' like Bogie were seeing, that harmony is an emergent thing, that outwells through non-hierarchic (an-archic) self-organization, rather than being something that is 'imposed' by a paternalist leadership. Leadership, to the libertarian leftist, rather than being a paternalist-imposer-of-kindly-order, is the carrier/keeper of the vision of a natural and authentic social collective and the protector of the free and open space for such self-organization that respects the authenticity and uniqueness of the diversity of individuals making up the social collective. These are two very different views of leadership, based on two very different views of how the world works.
Reagan was part of the group of paternalist politicians of the 'right' that originated the 'political cleansing' device of 'the blacklist';
"The Hollywood Blacklist. Fifty years ago this week, the House Committee on Un- American Activities began a series of clamorous hearings in Washington that sparked a campaign of anti-communist hysteria that swept through Hollywood, then the State Department, labor unions, academia and the armed forces. It was the age of loyalty oaths and McCarthyism, a chilling time in which free speech and the 1st Amendment were tossed out the window. Lives and careers were also ruined in other fields, but it was Hollywood, the incubator for America's popular culture, that became center ring for the Red Scare circus.
HUAC began its hearings on Oct. 20, 1947, with its rotund committee chairman, J. Parnell Thomas, perched on two telephone books and a red silk cushion so he could be seen by the swarm of newsreel and TV cameras. Two future presidents were on hand, Richard Nixon as a member of HUAC, Ronald Reagan as a friendly witness. Nineteen unfriendly witnesses were subpoenaed, mostly suspected communist writers and directors. Ten eventually testified, refusing to discuss their party affiliations or name party members. Known as the Hollywood 10, they were found in contempt of Congress, fired from their jobs and eventually sent to prison...
Fifty years after the blacklist's beginnings, the scars are still visible; wounds that should have healed are still fresh. Forgiveness is not in the air. As recently as January, the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. voted against giving its life achievement award to Elia Kazan, citing his HUAC testimony, in which he informed on eight friends who had been fellow members of the Communist Party... In today's Hollywood, honors are going only to those who were blacklisted. With a 50th-Anniversary date here, the movie business is soothing its conscience with a flurry of commemorative events. Much of this activity has been spurred by the industry's sense of complicity in the blacklist. The blacklist was not government-imposed -- it was created by the Hollywood studio chiefs themselves. For anyone with a fascination for human frailty, blacklist misdeeds cover the political spectrum. The industry's communist activities were dogmatic and sanctimonious; liberals easily bullied; conservatives guilty of redbaiting and anti-Semitism.
"It was a cultural holocaust, a tragedy from which the industry has never fully recovered," says Hollywood biographer Patrick McGilligan, whose new book "Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Blacklist" (1997) offers interviews with 36 blacklist survivors. "It's still a live issue because the survivors, and their children, haven't forgotten. And because it dramatically altered the climate of movie making. Even today, there are still risky political subjects that Hollywood won't take on."--- from 'Thought Control in America: The Birth of the Blacklist' by Patrick Goldstein
We can see where 'The All-American Gipper' figured in this, but where was the more worldly 'Bogie'?
Bogart and Lauren Bacall were vocal opponents of the 'Hollywood Ten' hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947.
"Bogart relied on his standing with his fellow actors to organize a delegation who went to Washington, D.C, during the height of McCarthyism, to protest the House Unamerican Activities Committee's harassment of Hollywood writers and actors. Bogart was not, however, prepared to deal with the industry pressure to abandon this campaign; within a year he disavowed his activities, retreating to his role as actor and apologizing for speaking out on politics"
"It was possible to get removed from the blacklist, as Nancy Reagan and many others did. ["To give you a sense of how these blacklists work, let's look at the case of Nancy Reagan. In the early 1950s, Nancy Davis discovered her name was on one of the blacklists and she could not longer work as an actress. Nancy went to the President of the Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan, and begged him to take her name of the list. Reagan got her name off the list, and he later married her."] But the clearance procedure was complex, secretive, and for many people, morally repugnant as it required naming names of "other" communists or ex-communists. Ex-Communists had to clear their names with the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the FBI before they could work again. The better known among them often had to publish articles in a mass-circulation magazine explaining how they had been duped by the party and describing its evils. For Humphrey Bogart, whose main offense was his public support for the Hollywood Ten, rehabilitation required an article in a fan magazine confessing, "I'm no Communist," just an "American dope."
It was also helpful to take some kind of overtly anti-Communist actions such as opposing the antiblacklist factions within the talent unions or circulating petitions against the admission of Communist China to the United Nations. The film industry required more than three hundred people to clear themselves by writing letters, which then had to be approved by James O'Neil, the former American Legion national commander, and such anti-Communist professionals as J. B. Matthews and Benjamin Mandel. Clearance was not routine. Even people who had no party ties had to write two or three drafts of their letters until they showed the appropriate degree of contrition. The show business people who couldn't or wouldn't clear themselves soon became unemployable and ostracized. Some left the country---if they could get passports. Others used subterfuges. Blacklisted writers worked under pseudonyms or hired "fronts" who were willing to pass off the blacklistees' scripts as their own. It was not a lucrative business. The aliases and fronts could not command the fees that the more established blacklisted writers had once earned. Producers knew what was going on and unscrupulous ones took advantage of it." --- Blacklists and Other Economic Sanctions, from Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents, (1994) http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/schrecker-blacklist.html
Two wonderful guys who had in common that they were respected icons of leadership in the eyes of the public, but while nothing changed in terms of their admirable personas, a differing philosophical/political dimension emerged, which had always been there but which was unseen through the immediate presentation of their personalities, which put Reagon strongly on the right side of the prevailing political powers, and which put Bogart strongly on the 'wrong side', ... so much so, that Bogie, in order to continue to 'have a life', was forced to suppress the public expression of his beliefs, and even purport to deny them.
What is at the deepest core essence of the different beliefs of these two likable human beings?.... Reagan who felt that paternalist imposing of political correctness was essential in bringing (imposing) order on the dynamic of the social collective and Bogart who felt that order was something authentic, that emerged from the self-organizing qualities of the social collective. Reagan feared that 'the evil empire' as he called the communist world, would 'take over' from the inside, from people being made the dupes of an evil ideology so that 'those that knew better, that knew evil when the saw it', had a duty to protect the masses from themselves. Bogart, perhaps because he have faith in 'the world', a collective of nations that had no paternalist hierarchy sitting over them to impose order amongst them, to self-organize in a harmonious way. Clearly, if evil is the dominant force in the world, that rises up within an 'an-archic' social collective in the absence of a paternalist hierarchy that imposes social order, ... then ultimately, a paternalist hierarchy must be imposed on the social collective of nations, which is where the 'US Empire' appears to be headed under the current admistrative leadership of George W. Bush.
The question of belief is raised here with respect to whether human and natural collectives are innately evil-tending in the absence of paternalist controls, or whether an-archic self-organization tends naturally towards harmony. This brings us back again to 'who we trust' as some of the best thinkers in the world believe as Reagan did, that without paternalist imposing of kindly order, pandora's box would be opened and there would be an explosion of chaos and evil.
Similarly, Aristotle told us that men had more teeth than women and that heavier objects fell to earth more rapidly than lighter ones and we-the-western-people believed him for more than 1800 years. That is to say, it was dominant popular belief over this period of time, though it highly likely that 'heretics' emerged from time to time that 'checked him' out these things, but when they who were nobodies, in offering self-developed findings to the public, were probably confronted with 'Oh sure, you're right and Aristotle's and an entire civilization is wrong!, ... come on, get real'.
As Galileo said in his Two New Sciences;
"I greatly doubt that Aristotle ever tested by experiment whether it be true that two stones, one weighing ten times as much as the other, if allowed to fall, at the same instant, from a height of, say, 100 cubits, would so differ in speed that when the heavier had reached the ground, the other would not have fallen more than 10 cubits."
When Galileo checked it out, he found that bodies of different weight fell to the ground at the same speed.
Those of us who have actually checked out the self-organizing dynamics of social collectives (e.g. exceptional teams, biological collectives such as funghi) and find that paternalist control hierarchy is not only unnecessary (it does not exist in nature, only in the rational abstracting mind of man) but a distinct hindrance in the dynamics of human social collectives are not actually prohibited from saying so, or from publishing in scientific journals, but this does not mean that we cannot be punished for saying so; e.g. by non-renewal of our contracts of employment etc. The gatekeepers of our established models (and therefore 'beliefs') of 'how things work' have control over whether these 'heretical ideas' ever really get their day in court to challenge the established popular belief, and people find it expedient to simply accept the findings of those they trust, and since rather checking out how many teeth the women they know have, relative to the men they know is more trouble than its worth, the popular view is unlikely to be changed unless such change is endorsed by the trusted gatekeepers of the particular 'belief area'.
Here we have a problem in how our society 'learns'. In our western world, education is via 'single-loop learning' (Argyris), otherwise known as 'negative feedback'. In systems terms, the 'control unit' or ' teacher' imposes the correct range of answers/behaviours on the rest of the constituents of the system and if they respond 'out of range' of the control-unit-specified acceptable responses, then they are 'punished' and forced back into compliance. Thus the thermostat accepts that the thermal behaviour of the ambient space it is situated within provided it falls within the specified desired range, ... however, if it falls out of that range, its negative feedback based regulatory resources are mobilized to drive the behaviour back into the 'acceptable' range. Meanwhile, 'double loop learning' is where the answers are not 'pre-specified' as, for example, where a trio of teachers; an economist, a political scientist and a sociologist were co-teaching a class of students by using their respective disciplinary knowledge to explain current developments. Since economics, politics and social behaviours are all simultaneously mutually influencing one another, there would be no explicit answers but the various knowledge offered by each of the disciplinary teachers could contribute to understanding based on consistency or coherency, ... by 'bringing the multiplicity of teaching models and real-life experiences into connection in the mind. In this case, the teachers are also 'learning' (immersed in the continuous outer loop of learning); i.e. the collective of teachers is, at the same time a student collective and there is no 'headmaster-teacher' or central hierarchical control as there is in single-loop learning so that 'double-loop' learning is effectively 'self-organizing' (collaborative).
Reflection shows that the teachers in single-loop learning mode would have periodically 'updated' their knowledge materials, incorporating, to some or other extent, developments in the other disciplines advancing in parallel with them, so that 'double-loop' learning takes away the 'rigidity' or apparent 'definitive truth' of current teaching and leaves the 'true understanding' of the issues open as understanding deepens continuously by immersing the inquirers within the situational dynamics that they are inquiring into. The establishment of 'what is correct' and 'what is incorrect' falls away in double-loop learning since understanding comes through coherency and consistency in multiple explanations which are each, in their own right, fundamentally incomplete. Since the teacher-students influence the shape of the emerging situations they are inquiring into; i.e. since there is 'leakage' between the situational dynamics which the learning is seeking to understand and the learning process itself, understanding and the situational dynamics are bound together in a coevolving codynamic.
This coevolutionary interdependence is referred to as 'the observer effect' and scientists only became aware of it in trying to come to grips with 'relativity', the 'uncertainty principle' and quantum behaviour, i.e. in the words of Berkeley physicist Henry Stapp;
"[The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics] was essentially a rejection of the presumption that nature could be understood in terms of elementary space-time realities. According to the new view, the complete description of nature at the atomic level was given by probability functions that referred, not to underlying microscopic space-time realities, but rather to the macroscopic objects of sense experience. The theoretical structure did not extend down and anchor itself on fundamental microscopic space-time realities. Instead it turned back and anchored itself ini the concrete sense realities that form the basiis of social life. . . . This pragmatic description is to be contrasted with descriptions that attempt to peer "behind the scenes" and tell us what is "really happening"". --- Henry Stapp, The Copenhagen Interpretation and the Nature of Space-Time.
We can't 'peer behind the scenes since we are included in, and simultaneously co-influencing the evolution of the dynamics we are looking out at, as is reinforced by the similar manner in which, in the self-organizing double-loop learning process, ... that which is going on inside of me that is imposing influence on what is going on out there is, at the same time under the influence of what is going on out there [which I am at the same influencing, which is at the same time influencing me etc. etc. etc.]. As in acoustic space wave dynamics, my breathing in is, at the same time, the breathing out of my neighbours; i.e. every expansion is at the same time a compression.
For our rational thinking (as contrasted with intuitive thinking) minds, rather than accepting that everything is moving relative to everything else (the dreaded 'three-body problem' where we try to understand gravity in terms of everything moving under the simultaneous mutual influence of everything else, it is simpler to hold the 'environment' to be separate from the individual constituent so that we can deal with the 'behaviour' of the individual as if it were 'independent' of the dynamical collective it is moving with respect to.
You can probably already 'feel' the challenge to your rational mind presented by the notion of three or more bodies moving under each other's simultaneous mutual influence. Newton tried to 'work it out' in his rational models but gave it up, saying;
"An exact solution for three bodies, exceeds, if I am not mistaken, the force of any human mind".
This is the problem presented to our rational thinking mind with double-loop learning,... there are no 'absolute answers' since our behaviour is simultaneously influencing the dynamical behaviour of the collective 'out there' that we are trying to understand, and at the same time as we are improving our understanding of it, our behaviour guided by this improved understanding is transforming it so that 'our behaviour' and 'the behaviour out there' are locked together in a coevolutionary dynamic. In short, 'we' are included in the 'collective' (our dynamical behaviour is included in the dynamics of the social collective we are inquiring into).
Now after all of that deep thinking about space, time, matter and motion,... the thread of Bogie and the Gipper will all but have fallen away, and we need to 'get it back again'.
The premise was essentially that 'someone', or 'many people' trusted by Reagan 'told him' that without a paternalist control hierarchy, chaos and evil would fluourish and the social stability we now enjoy, and that we had taken so many generations to develop, would be lost.
Bogart, on the other hand, did not buy into this theory, and felt 'intuited') that the dynamic of the social collective had the natural (an-archic self-organizing) capacity to sustain social harmony. As many of similar persuasion feel, it is this natural self-organizing social ordering dynamic that created government, not the other way around; i.e. it was not a paternalist control-hierarchy that created harmony in the dynamic of the social collective.
Just as Reagan and the McCarthyites felt that our thoughts could be poisoned by communism unless there was a paternalist thought control imposed on the minds of the masses to protect them from themselves, ... Bogart felt that the self-organizing of our free-from thought-control thoughts was naturally robust enough to sustain our understanding of how to manage our social dynamics. After all, it was this self-organizing thought dynamic from which our notion of representative democracy emerged, ... but there was no thought, originally, that these elected representatives would be any more than the trio of economist, politician and sociologist in the double-loop learning example above, ... representatives participating in a double-loop learning system that were stewarding hierarchical support and defense structures ON BEHALF OF THE PEOPLE, but in no way paternalist hierarchical controllers in a single-loop learning program, where the learning adjustment was to made periodically, through elections every four or five years, to change out the flavour of the paternalist thought-control and behaviour-control.
The role of the elected representative, as paternalist controller of the thoughts and actions of the public is a very different role that that which appoints him as an immersed and included teacher-student, as in the an-archic native 'learning circle' or in King Arthur's knights of the round table where everyone is equal and the teachings are not to be 'absolute' but the current understandings of a continuously evolving learning circle.
That the Gipper believed that paternalist thought-control and behaviour control was the only way to go, ... to keep chaos and evil from upwelling in the minds and behaviours of an uncontrolled social collective, is evident from his statements and behaviour during the McCarthy era and while he was president. That Bogie believed that the paternalist thought-control of the social collective was an insult to the people was evident from his behaviour during the McCarthy era, and since the American media supported and continues to support the paternalist thought-control strategy, however well meaning, ... it makes mincemeat out of 'leftists' such as Bogie, who are then faced to choose between continuing to 'have a life' or to be excluded by 'blacklist' from the mainstream flow-dynamic of society. Bogie likely never left his leftist faith in the social collective-minus-paternalist-thought-control behind, but he did capitulate to the pressures of the 'right' and make a public apology for 'being a dope' in terms of his political thinking. His following comment endured far longer than his 'I'm an American dope' comment, however;
"They'll nail anyone who ever scratched his ass during the National Anthem" (speaking of the House Un-American Activities Committee)
It would be hard to visualize Ronald Reagan making this statement in the relative open, but familiarity with the earthy salty-sailor gestalt of Bogart makes this statement 'resonate' with what we might expect him to say. The 'gestalt' somehow goes beyond the immediate impression of social charm and affability in the manner that a black gentleman showing up at a banquet attended by a mix of northern and southern white-gentlemen in the 1950's or before might have induced a split reaction.
If one believes that paternalist control is the only way to sustain order in the dynamic of a collective, then it follows that you will have no faith in the ability of the collective of nations so sustain order in a self-organizing manner and that a paternalist control entity must be implemented. Currently the United Nations is somewhere in between since it has given special veto powers to the world's most powerful nations. Even then, the US, under the paternalist controlling influence of George W. Bush, has launched a publicity campaign against the UN that has conditioned many Americans to the notion that the community of nations is incapable of self-organized government. The following statements come from George W. Bush or within his administration indicate the exclusionary (purificationist, blacklisting-based) control strategy for maintaining order in the dynamic of the social collective of nations;
"Since the United Nations is unwilling to enforce its Security Council resolutions, the United States must do so unilaterally in order to preserve the UN’s credibility.”
"The United Nations has demonstrated its pro-Iraqi bias by choosing Iraq to chair its Conference on Disarmament.” (The chair rotates every 30 days, following the alphabet as applied to the first letter of the country name)
“The irrationality of the United Nations can be illustrated by the fact that it voted the United States off the Human Rights Commission and has elected Libya its chair.” (The chair rotates by region and Libya was voted in, in Africa's turn by African nations while the commission contains three seats for western industrialized nations which rotate amongst themselves, then (in 2001 when Libya was elected), France, Sweden and Austria, with the U.S. rotating back in this year, thus the statement, without knowing this background, seriously distorts the appearance of the U.N's self-organizing decision-making).
The United Nations is dominated by thugs and dictators.”
“The United Nations should not have the right to tell the United States what it can and cannot do.”
* * *
So, these are the threads that underpin the 'good-guy' icons of Bogie and the Gipper and they run deep, tying in to the politics of the 'left' and the 'right'..
What is it then, that Aristotle or someone told some of us, so long ago that we don't remember when, if we ever knew, ... that we have forgotten so thoroughly that we can't even remember that we have forgotten.
In a nutshell, it is the proposition (built-in as a thinking default) that; we can manage a collective by managing the behaviour of the individual participants.
This learned belief is not qualified to 'human social collectives' but to collectives in general. It is a corollary of Newton's laws and it is built into our justice system but that doesn't prove it to be correct any more than Aristotle's belief that men had more teeth than women was proven to be correct because it was spoke with all of his authority behind it.
The problem with this proposition does not work is because it requires the splitting of the collective into two groups, those who manage and those who are managed, which reduces the collective to a single-loop learning system. Behaviours (expression of ideas and assertive actions) that are outside of the range of that which is accepted as 'correct behaviour' are forced back into compliance or the authors of the behaviours are excluded (blacklisted, incarcerated etc.). The problem with exclusion is that it operates on the author of the behaviour rather than on the behaviour. For example, if you could not force your child's behaviours back into the range specified as 'acceptable' by the paternalist control system, then to resort to exclusion of those behaviours would equate to the exclusion of the author of those behaviours; i.e. your child. More likely, in the case of family, the paternal control system would 'back off' and somehow accommodate the undesired behaviour, in which case the 'head-butting' or 'standoffs' would subside. In other words, the system would go into double-loop learning mode where there is no discrete split between teachers and students (managers and managed) but all members become teacher-students, or manager-managees.
Were the paternalist control system refuse to back off and take action to exclude the authors of the undesired behaviours, this would be a degenerate case of the management of the collective, since the management of those excluded would cease and management would resume focus on the purified subset; i.e. the management would effectively redefine 'the collective' according to their own definitions based on manageability, 'their management skills'. Thus they prove the proof of the proposition by throwing out the participants they can't manage until the collective is management-redefined as one they can manage, a clearly unauthorized-by-the-full collective 'abuse of power'.
While this situation was implicitly acceptable to the Gipper, it was not acceptable to Bogie. In fact, there is no guarantee that the paternalist purification will not proceed to enslave a goodly proportion of the collective (who will be forced to agree to acts of contrition such as saying, under duress, 'I am a dope') and incarcerate another goodly portion who resist redeeming themselves through acts of contrition.
The 'hole' in the proposition is apparent; i.e. the 'power' is being imposed by a privileged group though on individual participants to influence their behaviour. But if power to influence behaviour comes from groups, then how can one expect to manage a collective on the basis of individual behaviour since it is the groups of people that have the dominant influence over individual behaviour.
This may seem like a paradox but it is not.
It is not a paradox when you consider that the behaviour of an individual is influenced by their 'feeling' sense while behaviour manifests in terms of their actions, which we pick up through our visual sense. We 'see' the behaviour we call prostitution and we say that it is 'authored' by the woman 'doing it', and this is all 'visual domain' based inquiry. But the group of controlling males that gives her few choices but to do it, that 'blacklists' her from having a life within the mainstream unless she does it, is the deeper author of the behaviour which does not go away when the prostitute 'goes away' (is put in jail or leaves town).
Crony groups have enormous influence on behaviour, as the McCarthyites demonstrated to Bogart, but which he was already aware of. Thus to manage a social collective on the basis of the behaviour of individual participants is a non-starter (makes no sense). It is like making believe that you can manage the game of pool by managing the movement of the individual balls (but it is the groups or clusters of balls that determine the corridors of possibility-to-move available to it).
The dynamical behaviour of the individual emerges from the 'feelings' of that individual and the 'feelings' of the individual are influenced by the groups that surround and put pressure on the individual to behave in a certain way. There is a 'shadow' side here in that the paternalist groups that put pressure on an individual to behave in what they feel is a 'good' and 'correct' way, must know, deep down, that this same tactic is being used by not-exactly paternalist groups to coerce individuals to behave in whatever ways they would like them do (e.g. to prostitute themselves). It is very close to the bone, for sure, for a paternalist empowered by the democratic process to realize that his group-based power to influence the behaviour of an individual could as easily be used to influence the individual's behaviour in ways that would satisfy his basic urges. Cases of police officers and judges who have used their paternalist powers of office to coerce sexual favours from women are fairly common and the full volume of such activity, most of it going unreported, is likely to be very large. Last week, a local news item
Wednesday, June 2, 2004 PRINCE GEORGE, B.C. - A former provincial court judge in Prince George has been sentenced to seven years in prison for sexually abusing four girls who appeared before him in court – the youngest of them just 12 years old. David Ramsay, 61, had pleaded guilty to five charges [of the ten laid against him], including buying sex from minors, sexual assault causing bodily harm and breach of trust.
"The accused used his office to elicit satisfaction of his perverted lust and to shield himself from its consequences," said B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Patrick Dohm, who discarded a plea bargain of four to five years agreed upon by the defence and the prosecution. "His callousness toward these young women and his violence . . . two of whom he discarded like one might discard a pair of old shoes, justifies a sentence in the highest end of the range. ... One can hardly imagine a more infamous breach of trust."
As the one of the foremost historians of the 19th century, Lord Acton (1834 - 1902) said, quoting Leibnitz;
"Those who have more power are liable to sin more; no theorem in geometry is more certain than this."
At the time, the individuals assaulted by the judge did not FEEL that they were in a position to do anything about it, just as Bogart did not FEEL he was in a position to resist the pressures of the McCarthyites, which included blacklisting him from 'having a life' within the acting profession that was so dear to him, and within which he so excelled.
So McCarthyites, including 'the Gipper', then president of the Screen Actors Guild and a collaborator with the McCarthy activists, 'had their way' with Bogie as he 'bent over' for them.
Hardly a 'free country' one might say, but what is a 'free country'?
To further quote Lord Acton;
"By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his duty against the influences of authority and majorities, custom and opinion. ... Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end...liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition...The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to to govern. Every class is unfit to govern...Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Lord Acton's views are a 'vote of confidence' in the an-archic self-organizing capacities of a social collective to 'work things out' without having to resort to an elitist paternalist control hierarchy that imposes upon the masses the constraints to thinking and behaving that it feels are necessary to prevent an epidemic of chaos and evil-doing. Government by representative democracy does not have to equate to the appointment of paternalist controllers, relief from which is elections every four years at which time new controllers with new paternalist values will be appointed. This is a degenerate form of representative democracy, a single-loop learning form where those in control assume that they are in possession of 'the definitive truth' that it is their paternalist duty to teach their students for the good of the country.
Again, let's not lose sight of the basic flaw in the 'management geometry' here where the social dynamic is being managed through the visible behaviour of the individual, while the individual's visible behaviour is being shaped, through his invisible FEELINGS which are in turn being shaped by the pressures imposed on him by the crony collectives in whose dynamics he is immersed and included.
Bogart made the visible pronouncement 'I'm an American dope' because he was coerced into doing so by pressures imposed upon him, through his invisible FEELINGS, by a crony collective. He 'prostituted' his own freedom of expression and became the mouthpiece of the McCarthyites, at least in this one forced 'act of contrition', and in addition, he 'backed off' his protest efforts because he realized that, at that time when fear ruled, in spite of his substantial influence, he could not gather together the support to make a dent on the witch-hunting initiative but he could anger the witch-hunters to the point that he would deal himself out of any role or influence at all, other than that of the martyr and supposed traitor to his country (which was what a crushing defeat by the McCarthyites would amount to since the media reports the views of the winners, not the also-rans. The 'also-rans' are no longer worthy of news coverage because they no longer have any 'pulpit' to speak from, it being taken from them as part of the terms of their defeat.
If you are accused of being a witch and refuse to agree that you will cease behaving like a witch, then in the eyes of your accusers, you clearly declare yourself to be a witch. It follows as surely as the simplistic logic in 'if you are not with us, you're against us' and we are giving you full notice that we are 'anti-witch', now what are you?... because anti-anti-witch equates to 'witch'.
Were someone to confront you on the street with such nonsense, you would simply walk by and ignore them, ... but if the powers vested in the state are used to force you to respond, seriously, to this ridiculous proposition and put you in contempt of the law if you refuse, then it becomes a real problem, then the state has abused its powers and is suspending your freedom of expression, as was the case in the McCarthy era and again in the Bush era with the 'witch' of 'communism' being replaced by the witch of 'terrorism', 'terrorist' being defined in terms of 'behaviour', e.g as in Bill C-36 which amends Canada's criminal code so as to;
"establish provisions aimed at disabling and dismantling the activities of terrorist groups and those who support them. These include;
--- defining "terrorist activity" in the Criminal Code as an action that takes place either within or outside of Canada that . . .
-- . . .
-- is taken or threatened for political, religious or ideological purposes and threatens the public or national security by killing, seriously harming or endangering a person, causing substantial property damage that is likely to seriously harm people or by interfering with or disrupting an essential service, facility or system.
--- permitting the designation of groups whose activities meet the definition of terrorist activity as "terrorist groups." http://canada.justice.gc.ca/en/news/nr/2001/doc_27787.html
Such a behaviour-based definition is more than adequate to 'trap' 'freedom-fighting' behaviour against oppression, such as that of Nelson Mandela's, and label it 'terrorism'.
Illegally disrupting services outside of a legal strike action can, by this code, which is now law, be labeled as 'terrorism' and dealt with under the provisions of 'terrorism'. Though no-one would call the illegal strike by B.C. ferry workers 'terrorism', under conditions of government oppression countered by illegal protest actions, fear rises to a feverish level, as in the McCarthy era and this post 9/11 era and those who are the supporters of a repressive government will authorize the use of such provisions in order to restore the peace, RATHER THAN BACKING OFF THE REPRESSIVE ACTIONS OF THE STATE. In fact, repressive governments have been known to provoke anti-government protest so as to win public support for increasing the state powers of oppression, an accusation that has been made against the administration of George W. Bush, and which receives support from studies which suggest that the repressive actions of the Bush administration have exacerbated the incidence and risk of terrorism, rather than reduced it.
Many historians have suggested that the rise of an oppressive condition in the dynamic of a social collective 'sneaks up' on you like a slowly incoming tide. There are many indications of this slide down the slippery slope, but that is 'another story'. This 'story' seeks to inquire into how it is that two seemingly wonderful, amiable guys, both of whom are looked up to as 'leadership material' by those with a media-based familiarity of their personas, can lead to very different approaches in the management of the dynamic of social collectives due to their own 'belief systems'.
First we find that 'the Gipper' believes that paternalist control over the thoughts (idea dissemination) and actions of the social collective is necessary in order to prevent the spontaneous explosion of chaos and evil, while 'Bogie' believes that the an-archic self-organizing behaviours of a free social collective will rise to the challenge.
Then we find that the behaviour of the individual is shaped by the invisible FEELINGS of the individual which are in turn shaped by pressures and/or by accommodations/acceptances coming to him from the diverse social sub-collectives in whose dynamics he is immersed and included, even though the law is based upon the visible actions of the individual.
While our intuitive sense of justice is 'anti-abuse-of-power-based', we don't believe that the more powerful should take advantage of and abuse the less powerful, the system of justice we have implemented is 'anti-disturbance' based which is to say that the justice system is not empowered to consider whether the paternalist system of government which it serves is abusing their powers (e.g. by electing a crony special interest group that falls prey to the pitfall expressed by Lord Acton's citing of Leibnitz; "Those who have more power are liable to sin more; no theorem in geometry is more certain than this.")
History shows that the police and the judicial system remain faithful to an oppressive government all the way to the point of revolution and are often successful, together with a similarly faithful-to-the-oppressive-regime military, in squashing protest and revolution. Today, we are witness to largest public protests against government policy that have ever been seen, and we note that the response is not 'to listen' but to label the protests as the actions of irresponsible people and to invest in restrengthening the forces and laws to deal with rising 'irresponsible behaviour' rather than invest in listening and changing policy.
Now no-one in Canada believes that, even if the newly amended Criminal code provides for it, that a McCarthyism epoch of fear and polarization could descend upon this gentle and accommodating country, but the impatience of workers with what they feel is rising disopportunization by crony paternalists in power is growing, with workers being increasingly psychologically prepared for illegal strikes that may involve ( interfering with or disrupting an essential service, facility or system) and only the delicate balancing act of the arbitrators in 'binding arbitration' suspending serious conflict to this point in time.
Meanwhile, those who buy into the notion that shifting wealth and privileges from the 'less performant' to the 'more performant' (in money-making terms) in our society will give 'us all' a needed boost, are inducing a shift towards more conservative politics since this 'is' the conservative platform. Meanwhile, there are few who would or could deny that the 'more performant' are increasing those employed by transnational corporations who use their national managers and employees as collaborative 'pilots' in seeking out and exploiting natural means of production (low cost 'human resources') and natural resources. The greater effectiveness of local, national transnational managers in getting national human resources to do more for less, and to give up national natural resources at lower prices, the higher the pay of the transnational managers and thus the 'more performant' their rating, which means that a policy that shifts more stewardship and investment from the 'less performant' to the 'more performant' is increasing the empowerment of the transnational managerial class, to give the national human 'means of production' and natural resource up at lower costs to the transnationals whose faceless globally distributed stakeholders that are profiting, together with the managerial and professional classes, are changing on an daily, if not second-to-second, basis.
In the third world, to receive kickbacks from selling off natural resources at bargain basement prices is termed by the first world 'political corruption' but in the sophisticatd business art of the first world, ... it is called 'good business', and is discussed only by historian/philosophers like Lord Acton, under the context that;
"Those who have more power are liable to sin more; no theorem in geometry is more certain than this."
So, it was Aristotle that told people that 'men have more teeth than women' and because he was a trusted 'thinker', the popular thinking sustained this notion for more than 18 centuries.
Why so?
Few people go to the trouble of inquiring into the wet and messy depths of things to keep the trusted experts honest, so that the popular belief is sustained by 'who you believe in' rather than by personal experience based validation. Thus the individual who checks it out is the rarity, and when he reports that the trusted expert is wrong, he is not only mocked, he is accused of ego-inflation, to think that he could question a magnificent thinker like Aristotle, like Newton, like Einstein. But when you come down to it, the ideas of all of these great thinkers give way to more comprehensive ideas that are not necessarily more complex, but readily available to our experience and intuition. Newton avoided the 'three-body problem' where the planets moved under each others simultaneous mutual influence and Poincaré came along in 1890, explaining that Newton avoided it not because his model was more true, but because it was more convenient and simple. Poincaré explained that Newton had built upon the notion that rotation was 'absolute' and thus one could say that 'the Earth turned' without having to ask or answer the question 'relative to what?'. But Newton's notion that 'rotation is absolute' equates to imposing the assumption that 'space is absolute', for that is effectively what the Earth must then be rotating relative to. As Poincaré showed, there is no way, available to our experience, to test such a hypothesis as the 'space is absolute' and to find the point that is the center of this absolute space to which all motion ultimately is referred, thus the notion that 'the Earth turns' is a convention, ... it is a convention that simplifies the equations of motion, and that is why Newton used it, to make his mathematical principles of motion come out simply as the 'three body problem' was a 'real bitch' as Poincaré also found.
Did somebody tell you that 'the Earth turns' and did you believe them?
Do you still believe it?
Because if you do, you can map your way all the way through, from the notion of the absoluteness of space and the corollary notion of it being populated by 'independent' material agents which are the foundational basis for all dynamics. It therefore follows that it is entirely reasonable to manage the dynamics of a social collective on the basis of the behaviour of the individual since any and every group dynamic can then be determined from the elemental independence of the individual material agents, and thus you can validate the Gippers 'rightist' position since there is no such thing as 'self-organizing' behaviour of a social collective that transcends what can be determined starting from the basics of independent individuals.
But if you believe that a collective is capable of this sustained accommodative-assertive resonance that transcends anything that can be deduced from the so-called 'independent' behaviours of the individual participants, then you can map your way through, from the notion of the relativity of space and the corollary notion that space is not a 'background container' but the continuously emerging relational dynamic that the observing individual is immersed and included in, and behaves relative to. It therefore follows that it is entirely UNREASONABLE to manage the dynamics of a social collective on the basis of the behaviour of the individual (as any decent pool player well knows) since the behaviour of the individual is shaped by the pressure imposed, through the intermediacy of the shape of possibility space, by the crony groups which the individual is immersed and included in, and thus you can validate Bogie's 'leftist' position that the 'self-organizing' behaviour of a social collective OVER-RIDES (i.e. 'transcends') the behaviour of the individual and thus 'crony collectives', if left unchecked, can coercively shape the behaviour of the individual, as is in fact proven by the McCarthyite crony-collective coercion of the behaviour of the individual we know as 'Humphrey Bogart'.
The democratically elected representatives do not have to think of themselves as paternalist control agents, as in 'single-loop learning', .. they can think of themselves as teacher-learners immersed in the double-loop learning flow. Sure they are entrusted to 'make decisions' and 'intervene' in troublesome situations, but like the teacher of autistic children or even of creative children, they need not intervene on the basis that they know the definitive truths and are thus equipped with absolute judgement of 'correct behaviour' and 'incorrect behaviour'. They can intervene instead, as we would do as children, on the basis of restoring harmony in the collective, which makes no absolutist assumptions as to who is right and who wrong. By this orientation of the regulatory authority to the sustaining of harmony in the dynamic of the collective (which in anthropological history, comes through self-organization from a peer-peer social collective), a Nelson Mandela may still be obliged to 'cool his heels' in prison, but there is no absolutist judgement as to whether he is a 'freedom fighter' or a 'terrorist' so that this separation of the 'conflicting sides' is instead seen as an 'expedient' to allow the resumption of harmony in the dynamic of the social collective while the justification of the Mandela protest, which asks for accommodative transformation on the part of the empowered regime, is considered.
If an 'anti-disturbance' oriented police and justice system simply 'close their books' on the question of the legitimacy of the protest, by their method of categorizing the behaviour as 'evil' or 'terrorist', without addressing the question of the 'abuse of power' by the official democratically elected regime, then there is no protection against a spiralling of conflict arising from the empowered paternalist controllers using ends-justifies-the-means oppressive actions to quell legitimate yet illegal protest, ... 'legitimate' since it is inspired by an abuse of power by the democratically elected representatives of the people, who are monitoring and managing on the basis of 'what people are doing' (MLuhan's 'visual space' view), rather than 'what people are feeling' (McLuhan's 'acoustic space' view).
Those that feel that they are 'the chosen ones' because they are 'the more performant' in terms of money-making ability have an egotism that is likely to move them into the paternalist controller ranks. Even though they are no longer 'of the local community' but agents of a transnational corporation, they may nevertheless focus on the money they are bringing in and what they spend cascading on down through the social collective and the jobs they are helping to create and the status and recognition for their country they are helping to build. But they are unlikely to open themselves up to the thought that their power emerges from their acting as a turbine in a delivery pipeline coming from the outwelling flow of human and natural resources of their country and moving on out to satisfy the needs of a faceless transnational profit-making machine, and that their 'more performant' status and their power rises in proportion to the flow through that pipeline, regardless of the impact on the human and natural resources of their nation, that they have been given privileged stewardship over.
Ralph Klein, for example, can speak with power and authority as long as the flow in the pipeline is strong, but as it declines, his turbine-spin power base declines with it (since he realizes he will not be around when the petroleum resources deplete, as do many current era residents of Alberta, though his/their community will persist, it is tempting to 'make hay while the sun shines' and even make fun of your 'less performant' neighbours, attributing your own success to your 'more performant' capacities rather than to the rate that you are selling off the common wealth of the nation. Were plate tectonics sufficiently swift to shift the subsurface locations of the petroleum wealth back-and-forth across the provinces, this would have a very humbling effect on politicians like premier Ralph Klein.
This brings out the basic flaw in defining 'more performant' in terms of an ability to 'make money'. Ultimately, as in the depression era, there must be a return to the self-organizing capacities of the local collectives. As this occurs, the paternalist class can no longer count on empowerment through the spinning turbine effect from the rate of outflow of natural resources, sucked on by transnational corporations, and solutions must be developed instead from self-organization at the grass-roots level. Then comes the restoring of an awareness that the 'paternalist controllers' that constitute the governance system do not create the order in the dynamic of the social collective, ... the order in the dynamic of the social collective creates the system of governance.
The control hierarchy is an abstraction, an illusion or mental mirage that is sustained only by people 'rationally' believing in it and thus 'making it come true' (in the liimited sense that the pool player can predict the results of his transactions and prove that he can indeed make them transpire, an illusion that is overlain on the more comprehensive reality that the relationships amongst the balls are transforming). As John Lennon says in this regard; "Life is something that happens to us while we are busy making other plans."
Reagan is a believer in this illusion of control hierarchy wherein the order in the collective follows from the downward cascading lines of command and control, ... while Bogart understands that the behaviour of the individual is shaped by the manner in which the crony social sub-collectives he is immersed and included in co-manipulate the shape of possibility space that he must move through in order to survive and manage his personal authentic becoming. Bogie's understanding of crony group influence on the behaviour of the individual, as opposed to the notion that the individual is behaviourally 'independent' and acts out of his own free-wiill and purpose, is underscored by his own coerced behavioral capitulation to the pressures imposed by the McCarthyites.
Bogart and Reagan are both wonderful guys as far as we would relate to them on a personal basis, but they had very different beliefs and values with respect to managing the dynamics of the social collective.
Reagan's paternalist support for thought-control and behaviour control, fuelled by fear of leftist political takeover is not about to touch the tributes pouring in, in the wake of Reagan's death. Bogart is long since departed and few politicians in the US Empire dominated world are likely to speak their thoughts openly, apart from those that have already 'paid their dues, i.e;
Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi
I express my deep regret because Reagan died before facing justice for his ugly crime that he committed in 1986 against the Libyan children.
Miguel D'Escoto, former foreign minister in Nicaragua's revolutionary Sandinista government
"There is not the least doubt that President Reagan did Nicaragua much harm, caused many deaths. He may not have had much time or inclination to regret the damage he did, but regardless of that we ask God to take pity on his soul."
As the Beatles would say; 'It's all showbiz', a media event where the wonderful, charming and glamourous of the world of the empowered, the 'paternalist class', get together to further their caretaking plans for the global social collective.
The non-paternalist an-archic faith-in-the-self-organizing-capacities-of-the-social-collective 'little people' that try to do their bit, like Bogart, and bounce off the beast like a gnat off the hide of a rhinoceros, will not be remembered in such a glamourous manner. And even though Bogie capitulated to Reagan and the McCarthyites, I can still imagine hearing him say;
"They'll nail anyone who ever scratched his ass during a eulogy to the Gipper"
But who is 'they'?
Apparently, a crony paternalist control group that is heavily influencing the behaviour of individuals.
So whoever it was that told us that we can manage a collective by managing the behaviour of the individual participants must have intended 'managing' to mean the application of coercive pressure on the FEELINGS of the individual rather than dealing with the visible mechanics of the individual's behaviour; i.e.'managing' not on the after-the-fact basis of 'what the individual does' but instead on the 'before-the-fact shaping' of what he is going to do, management that the courts of law never see, management that is beyond the reach of the law, ...
... management that uses the law as a tool of invisible coercion to achieve the unarticulated private agendas of paternalist control freaks.
* * *
Epilogue: June 11, 2004
After his encounter with the McCarthyites, and after his coerced act of contrition, there was nowhere in Hollywood that Bogart could feel safe speaking openly against the actions of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. One would have to say that the entire space he was immersed in was oppressive and even in the privacy of his bedroom, in talking with his wife Lauren Bacall, who had accompanied him on his pre-contrition trip to Washington (1947) to protest the Committee' treatment of actors, he might have lowered his voice when expressing his true, heartfelt views on government sponsored 'thought control'.
Oppression would appear to be a property of one's situation in space that acts upon one's feelings. But how real is oppression? In Bogart's case, we could say, that he was threatened by the fear of the REAL possibility of the loss of his life as an actor, and that this fear governed his manner of engaging with the dynamical situation he was immersed and included in. But what is a 'dynamical situation'? Why do I believe it's important to know what it is?
Our western systems of government, ... and more generally our western systems of managing the dynamics of social collectives are (at least we see them as being) based on the single-loop learning, negative feedback driven control of individual behaviour. The 'negative feedback' is the regulatory authority unleashing of punishment that is triggered wherewhen the individual's behaviour goes beyond the prescribed limits of acceptable behaviour, given that this departure from the prescribed norm is detected and the violator apprehended.
This 'negative feedback' action is based on the visible actions of the individual, but when we speak of 'oppression', we are often speaking of 'what is not done' because of threats and coercion of crony subcollectives such as the McCarthyites. What the individual does not do is clearly NOT addressable through process that keys to the visible, tangible actions of the individual. From time to time, we feel more or less oppression, depending upon the particular situation we find ourselves in; e.g, as when we have a heavy mortgage and are behind in our payments. Once again, in the previous sentence, the notion 'situation' arises and in an important way since goes hand-in-glove with the FEELING of being oppressed, and the feeling of being oppressed gates and modulates our visible behaviour and is the invisible reciprocal to the 'tip-of-the-iceberg' visual manifestation of individual behaviour.
Can we simplify our 'feeling of being oppressed' to 'paranoia', to something that is purely 'in our mind', ... something we are 'imagining'? In a way we can, but at the same time, our experience informs us that if we do not suppress those behaviours that are proscribed by the oppressive situation we are in, then 'negative feedback' or 'punishment' will surely 'descend upon us' like a plague, infecting our life and making it sickly.
We seem to live within a field of tensions whose balance is tenuous and which can collapse in on us depending on how we move. Our living space is pregnant with potentials that we can feel but cannot see. The shape of these tensions that we are situated within seem to emerge from the way we move, act, behave, relative to one another. How justified are we in the simplified substituting of our continuously transforming, unique pregnant-with-potentials situation to a mental model which explains everything purely in terms of the movements, actions, transactions, behaviours of 'independent' individuals within an empty containing space?
We need to answer this question if we are 'believers' in managing the dynamics of social collectives on the basis of the visible behaviour of individual participants.
What about all those behaviours that are desired but never actualized and made visible due to the oppressiveness of one's situation where one is coerced to suspend certain behaviours, including certain types of utterances.
How can we ever hope to understand the dynamics of a collective without understanding the suspension of behaviours?
That visible, actualized behaviours are the 'tip-of-the-iceberg' seems an appropriate terms since the bigger story seems to be 'what is not done' and it is bigger in dimensionality since the oppressive potentials are all around you, they are a condition of the space you are situated in though they seem to apply uniquely to you, ...they are not centered by coming from everywhere, from centers everywhere. You are immersed in the space of these oppressive potentials, ... while your visible behaviour, what you do, are single-centered, centered in you. The dimensionality of your actions is fractal, beyond that of a line and less than that of a curved surface, ... 'one point something' (1.x) while the dimensionality of the oppressive potentials you are immersed in is more like 3.0, ... like the 'acoustic space' sensations that accompany the feeling of immersion. The incontrovertible understanding coming to us from our experience is that what we feel is higher dimensional than what we see. We can argue about the reality of our sensing of oppressive potentials, ... we can say that it 'all in our paranoid minds' and that the only thing we can really count on is when we actually stop suspending our desired behaviour and validate that we are indeed punished for it.
But whether or not our sensing of oppressive potentials is 'all in our mind', whether or not the armed robber who threatened to shoot us if we called for help is really still around to do so or not, .. is not the relevant question if our inquiry is for the purpose of understanding the dynamics of social collectives. Does our sensing of oppressive potentials influence the evolution of dynamics in the social collective? The answer, given to us by our real-life experience, can only be 'YES'.
So, somehow, by the manner in we behave RELATIVE to one another, we set up these fields of oppressive potentials that apply uniquely to us as individuals since we are each uniquely situated within the dynamical space of the social collective. And the influence of these oppressive potential-fields are of an intrinsically higher dimensionality of behaviour-shaping than visibly manifests in those behaviours that we do not suspend but which we actualize.
How is it possible to avoid concluding that the behaviour-shaping influence that derives from the dynamical space we are each uniquely immersed in, is the essential meaning-giving context for our manifestly visible behaviours, ... that our manifest, visible behaviours are just the tip-of-the-behavioural-iceberg, .. representing the actualizing within those corridors of possibility wherein our the strength of our inner potentials is sufficient to overcome the ambient oppressive potential-field strength that characterizes our particular situation in the dynamical space of the social collective?
I don't know about you, ... but I can't avoid this conclusion.
It follows that managing the dynamics of a social collective on the basis of the visible behaviours of the individual participants in the social collective is a total sham. What is REALLY going on is invisible and available only to our feelings and intuition. There is no way to understanding and managing the dynamic of a social collective on the basis of the visible behaviour of the individual participants.
What we see 'going on out there' via our visual space perception is the mere shadow of what is really going on. Our feelings and intuition are quite familiar with this. As we observe the wife of the abusive husband, her manner of going about her business speaks volumes about the oppressive potentials she is immersed in which gate and modulate her visible actualized behaviour, and we can sense the truncated limbs of her desired but unfulfilled reaching out, what could have been the outgrowing tentacles from the bubbling potentials of her authentic becoming, stunted and stifled like the stifling of a bubbling cauldron of heated water as the ambient pressure is raised, when the pressure-cooker encloses it.
What if the lid was taken off and the authentic becoming potentials of the diversity of participant in the social collective were liberated? Is this a thought to inspire fear or rejoicing? That seems to depend on one's belief system. For a person that believes that the social dynamic is given by the purpose-driven behaviours of the individual participants, it will be essential to assure that such 'purpose' is a kindly one, and to paternalistically impose such kindly purpose where there is uncertainty. For a person that believes that the social dynamic is inductively shaped as the inner potentials of authentic becoming overcome the oppressive potentials of one's situation within the dynamical space of the social collective, to interfere paternalistically on the basis of the visible behaviour of individuals would be an ignorant and fear-based denial of the self-organizing capacities of the collectives of nature within which the human social collective nests.
We are caught up in a paternalist management paradigm, a single-loop learning social collective that believes that an 'individual's purpose' is the elemental 'drive' that shapes the dynamic of the social collective. Given this view, it only makes sense to seek to manage 'individual purpose' as is made manifest through the individual's visible behaviour, and that is precisely 'where we're at'.
In this paternalist orientation, we ignore the invisible landscape of oppressive potentials available to our feeling senses that we are immersed in, that shapes the wherewhen outwellings of our authentic becoming, suspending them herenow and opening up to them therenow.
The paternalist world of visual behaviour based management is a tip-of-the-iceberg world of logic and rationality that denies that the over-riding space-potentials-sensing role of feelings that our authentic becoming 'pushes out from' in simultaneous codetermining reciprocity to the accommodational opening up for this pushing out. As a social collective, we co-creatively shape the landscape of oppressive potentials that we are immersed in, this landscape forming out of our simultaneous mutual authentic-becoming outwellings. Our actual 'becoming', while 'authentic' since only we occupy the unique situation within the dynamical space of the social collective that we do, is nevertheless continuously co-shaped by the simultaneous reciprocal pressures of inside-outward pressing individual and the enveloping-including outside-inward pressing collective.
We thus, unavoidably, co-determine one another's becoming and paternalist controls imposed on the behaviour of the individual, born of fear of our own creative capacities and an over-simplistic mental model of space, time, matter and motion, encumber the sacred space of authentic becoming and cripple our natural self-organizing management of the dynamics of the social collective.
We know this view of the world in terms of the tip-of-the-iceberg visual space view of the behaviour of the individual is a sham, but we continue to go along with it, because of the coercive power of the paternalist forces in our society, that threaten to 'steal our lives', our authentic becoming, as the Gipper et al threatened to steal Bogie's life unless he submitted to their thought-control. As psychiatrist-philosopher Ronald Laing says;
'They are playing a game. They are playing at not
playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I
shall break the rules and they will punish me.
I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.'
So what's the outlook for restoration of 'feelings' as the basis for managing the dynamic of the social collective?
That's the only way that nature does it's business, so that is, in fact, what is going on and has always gone on.
What we are stuck in, is an illusion. The illusion that the control hierarchies are 'determining' what is going on when it is obviously not so. Our suspension of authentic behaviour is governed by our feelings which tune in to the oppressive/accommodative potentials of the dynamical space we are uniquely situated within. This is an invisible landscape that tells the story of our social dynamic while we 'make believe' that the social dynamic is 'determined' by the behaviours of the individual constituents acting in-their-own-'independent'-right.
As a collective, we can stop the game of make-believe any time we like. Those who aspire to the role of paternalist protectors of righteous purpose will not be pleased by the abdication of their protegé's, but that is simply an issue that we will all have to deal with in a more-or-less 'accommodative' manner.
* * *
Second Epilogue: June 12, 2004
What runs counter to our western culturally conditioned 'intuition' is the experienced reality that we use 'space' as an intermediary for managing our dynamics. 'Space' in this sense, is 'what is happening around us', the 'ambient dynamic' which we perceive by 'feeling' but which is invisible and therefore not available to our mental models of 'what things do'. Our feelings tell us when we should 'hold back' from doing something and also when 'the time is right' to do something, ... and in this case the sense of the word 'time' is 'phase', ... to know to hunker down and pull our wings in close to our body when the ambient pressure builds and to unfold and extend our wings when the pressure drops, as the goose flying within the flock does.
Paraphrasing Mach's principle, which speaks to space-matter dynamics in general, ... 'space conditions our behaviour as we condition the behaviour of space'.
This readily seen in both the case of geese flying in formation and in the experience of Bogie during the McCarthyist era. While I referred to the higher dimensionality of the dynamics of space relative to the dynamics of material behaviour as '3.0' relative to '1.x', ... the dimensionality of fluid flow, which seems a more appropriate model, is infinite (implying centers everywhere in space). Without getting hung up on details that mathematical science can't yet tie down, the point here is that the role of space in managing the behaviour of the constituents is innately 'deeper' in meaning than the role of kinetic behaviour of the participants.
We can see that the role of space as an intermediating 'manager' of behaviour 'trumps' the notion of the'purpose' of the individual participating constituent of space, since it immerses the individual in an oppressive pressure that operates on inner-outer behavioural phase (encouraging the immersed individual NOT to allow certain behaviours to outwell when the ambient space is pregnant with potentials to squeeze and suffocate such behaviours). Here the image comes to mind that extends to the notion of 'behaviour' from pure kinetics to a developmental life cycle, where 'behaviour' starts off as a purposeful intent or potential that can test 'whether the time is right' (meaning whether the outwell-phasing is right) or whether space is in a squeezing down mode relative to outwellings of that kind of behavioural actualization.
Now, as a detached, outside observer (i.e. in our 'rational' modeling mode), we would tend to REDUCE these goings-on to mental imagery cast in absolute space and absolute time; i.e. in a sequential time-based 'feedb-back loop', as follows; .... first comes purpose (out of the blue?), second we 'test the water' to see the conditions are appropriate for actualizing this purpose in a kinetic behaviour, .. if 'no', return to 'purpose', modify purpose as necessary, and repeat test cycle, ... ultimately 'swallowing' one's purpose or holding its actualization in indefinite suspension or coming up with another way of actualizing it in kinetic behaviour wherein it is better-matched to the ambient condition of space (i.e. it meets or exceeds the threshold requirements for actualization).
Now this is pretty damn complicated, and it is at a similar point in this sort of analytical discussion, as Kepler speaks to the behaviour of the individual relative to the collective in 'Harmonies of the World', that he suggests there is a reciprocity between what is going on inside and outside from a dynamical space oriented view, that is available to our 'instincts' and which puts us in touch with the simultaneous harmony of dynamical space (the simultaneously coordinated dynamic of the collective) so that we are forced to 'dismiss' this view of the absolute behaviour of the individual in-its-own-right (which he terms the 'true journey') and perceive the dynamic instead, in relative inner-outer terms as available to our instinct or 'intuitive feeling'.
". . . this special business of the harmonies, which is a most clear footprint of the highest providence over solar affairs, now being added to that consideration wrings from me the following confession: not only does light go out from the sun into the whole world, as from the focus or eye of the world, as life and heat from the heart, as every movement from the King and mover, but conversely also by royal law these returns, so to speak, of every lovely harmony are collected in the sun from every province in the world, nay, the forms of movements by twos flow together and are bound into one harmony by the work of some mind ..."
"For if the ratios of the journeys are harmonic, all the other effects which the planets have will be necessitated and bound up with the journeys, so that there is no room elsewhere for establishing harmonies. ... Therefore there will be sense-perception in the total world, namely in order that the movements of all the planets may be presented to sense-perceptions at the same time. For that former route --- from observations through the longest detours of geometry and arithmetic, through the ratios of spheres and the other things which must be learned first, down to the journeys which have been exhibited --- is too long for any natural instinct, for the sake of moving which it seems reasonable that the harmonies have been introduced. Therefore with everything reduced to one view, I concluded rightly that the true journeys of the planets through the ether should be dismissed, and that we should turn our eyes to the apparent diurnal arcs, ... and we must see, not how far away from the sun any one of the planets is, nor how much space it traverses in one day (for that is something for ratiocination and astronomy, not for instinct), but how great an angle the diurnal movement of each planet subtends in the solar body, or how great an arc it seems to traverse in one common circle described around the sun, such as the ecliptic, in order that these appearances, which were conveyed to the solar body by virtue of light, may be able to flow, together with the light, in a straight line into creatures, which are partakers of this instinct, ..."
What Kepler is saying, and what our experience is telling us, through the story of Bogie and the Gipper, is that the analytical deconstruction we impose, which breaks things out in terms of the kinetic behaviours of individual participants, is not only a highly complicated way of 'looking at things' but it falls innately short of the mark in conveying an understanding of what is REALLY going on.
Instinctively we know, through our feelings of being squeezed in or suppressed by the dynamic of the collective that our dynamic is immersed and included in, ... and by when that feeling of being squeezed or suppressed gives way to a feeling of accommodation inviting an outwelling actualizing of a behavioural potential, when the season of actualizing that behavioural potential is ripe.
Instinctively, we do not split apart our internal 'drive of purpose' versus the 'receptive or rejective response of the environment' and reconnect them with a sequential time-based adaptive feedback loop and why should we? ... if our dynamic is included in the dynamic of our enveloping collective, ... as 'relativity' says it must be, and our experience that a collective is capable of sustaining "one harmony' (accommodative-assertive coresonance), as Kepler speaks of, which implies simultaneous mutual influence (a natural inference but one that leads to fuzzy and complicated mathematics)?
The splitting apart can only come in our heads, by virtue of imposing a notional absolute containing space to which we can reference and describe the behaviour of the individual as if in-its-own-right instead of accepting that the individual's behaviour is referencing to the enveloping dynamical collective (dynamical space) that the individual is enveloped and included in.
... take a breather here, as that was pretty dense stuff,...
Bogie did not suddenly find that his 'being' was the lucky recipient of the seed of a new purpose planted in him by the cosmic force, that. from the time of its arrival or conception, sprouted up within him and motivated him to go to Washington and protest the harassment of his actor brothers by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Bogie instinctively felt the rising 'squeeze' of suppression RELATIVE to the open outwelling actualization of certain behavioural potentials.
SPACE is the intermediary here and Bogie knew that the McCarthyites were loading up space with suppressive potentials that would close down certain behavioural potentials and stifle their outwelling actualization. It was not as if the House Committee was personally grabbing everyone by the shoulders and forcing them to keep their leftist ideas and actions to themselves, .. the House Committee was using the intermediation of the common living and working space, by 'blacklisting' those who would not give the names of fellow actors that had participated in 'leftist' activities. Lee J. Cobb who was put on the blacklist but later capitulated spoke of the experience as follows;
"When the facilities of the government of the United States are drawn on an individual it can be terrifying. The blacklist is just the opening gambit - being deprived of work. Your passport is confiscated. That's minor. But not being able to move without being tailed is something else. After a certain point it grows to implied as well as articulated threats, and people succumb. My wife did, and she was institutionalized. In 1953 the HUAC did a deal with me. I was pretty much worn down. I had no money. I couldn't borrow. I had the expenses of taking care of the children. Why am I subjecting my loved ones to this? If it's worth dying for, and I am just as idealistic as the next fellow. But I decided it wasn't worth dying for, and if this gesture was the way of getting out of the penitentiary I'd do it. I had to be employable again."
What are we missing in conceiving of the world dynamic in terms of the behaviour of the constituents?
We are missing the fact that what we experience is behavioural potentials that want to outwell and the selective oppressive/suppressive potentials of the dynamical space that we are immersed and included in, which 'trains us' by means of what actual behaviours it (the space of the dynamical collective) it will readily accommodate and or suppress. In other words, the dynamical common space we are immersed in has powers to shape our actual behaviour by imposing differental suppressive/accommodative pressures on our behavioural potentials allowing them to partially outwell/actualize and to partially remain suppressed/unactualized.
As it happens, this inner-outer potentials threshold based shaping of what is actualized, is the underpinnings of 'self-organized criticality', an explanation for avalanches and earthquakes and, according to the late Per Bak, ... a general way of describing nature's dynamics.
But one does not have to wait on the arrival of a fully developed 'relativity theory' or 'self-organized criticality theory' to say, without a shred of a doubt, that the models of the dynamics of social collectives that we base on the actual behaviour of the individual participants are radically incomplete since the actual behaviours can only be realistically described relative to the meaning-giving context of the suppressive/accommodative behaviour of the space they are outwelling into.
Behaviour is not sole-authored by the individual participants in the dynamic of a collective, behaviour is co-authored by the outside-inward accommodative/suppressive potentials/pressures of enveloping space relative to the inside-outward behavioural potentials of the individual space-inclusion, in the manner that an included bubble of dynamical fluid (e.g. air) nesting within an including dynamical fluid (e.g. water) simultaneously co-author the shape of one another's behavioural dynamics.
Whenever we perceive and inquire into the dynamics of social collectives solely on the basis of actual kinetic behaviours, a rational simplification that ignores the realm of feeling based perception of space-based behaviour shaping potentials and thus the basic dual-authorship of behaviour, we are deceiving ourselves. Thus our western system of justice operates on this self-deception since it keys simply to the actualized behaviours of individuals disregarding the over-riding behaviour-shaping role of space, and similarly for western treatment of mental disorder which keys to the actualized behaviours of the 'mentally disordered' disregarding the essential meaning-giving context of the behaviour shaping accommodative/suppressive potentials of space. The same again applies to 'criminal behaviour' and 'terrorist behaviour' seen as if 'in-their-own-right'.
Those charged with governing on this radically incomplete basis of 'actual' behaviours of individuals detach themselves from those they are governing, but in reality, they are attached through the intermediating accommodative/suppressive potentials of space and when we say that some people 'have acquired more power' than others, such power is not innate in the person (he or she may be frail and weak), but in the accommodative/suppressive potentials of the common space of the collective dynamic relative to the behavioural potentials within them that want to outwell/actualize. When the queen walks through the crowd, the way the crowd opens up for her (the same crowd would push a bum out of the way) is not due to her magical powers acting-at-a-distance on the others to make them behave simultaneously so as to reshape their spatial configuration, but is instead due to the accommmodative/suppressive potentials of space (space being this geometro-dynamical condition) relative to her inner pressing-to-outwell behavioural potentials.
Can we explain the opening up of the crowd in terms of actual behaviours of individuals?
Can we explain the opening up of a densely clustered configuration of billiard balls in terms of the actual behaviours of the individual balls?
Yes we can but such explanation lacks the 'dimensionality' to convey the meaning of an 'expanding hole' since an 'expanding hole' connotes simultaneous accommodative inwelling (backing off and out) and assertive outwelling (pushing into what is backing off and out), in the manner of an expanding circle on the surface of a sphere (spherical space is needed to represent dynamics that are mutually relative to themselves).
This single action appears as two actions to our rational mind because we want to personify the source of action as the individual, and thus we visualize those inside the circle as pushing out while those outside the circle, while resisting, are being pushed back. There is 'opposition' here, is there not, ... and for opposition, one needs two sides, right? This is only true in a flat plane. On the surface of a sphere, there can only be one collective which pushes off of itself. Only when we, the observer, reify and label some as 'pushers' and others as 'pushed' on the basis of whether they are in a region of space that is expanding or a region of space that is contracting, do we artificially impose this 'split' as thus being able to characterize the dynamic in terms of the actual behaviour of individual participants.
Now 'pushing' connotes a behaviour that is attributable to an individual in-its-own-right and it is essentially 'linear' and dependent on time; i.e. it connotes a time-based displacement that can be either positive (forward) or negative (backward).
Philosophically, as Poincaré pointed out, we run into the problem 'he displaces himself relative to what?' and since he now stands in-his-own-right, we are forced to respond 'relative to space', ... making space into something absolute, the price of breaking him out of the dynamical collective that included his dynamic (that his dynamic was relative to).
There is no way, after we have reduced the vision of an expanding hole to the linear notion of individual 'independent' constituents pushing one another around, to 'lift off the sourcing influencing' from the individuals and give it back to 'the hole'. The basic behavioural dynamics of the individuals in the collective are now 'absolute' and the 'self-referentiality' or 'self-relative' aspect of dynamical 'inclusionality' has been discarded. On a flat plane extending to infinity, the individuals inside the expanding circle can push the others outside the circle forever without encountering any signs of their individual actions as being relative to the actions of the collective, but were the collective on the surface of the sphere, they would find that by pushing would not go outward indefinitely but would wrap around and push them from behind like people walking in a circle one foot behind the other and then one person extending his arm to push the one ahead two feet away and that person doing likewise and so and and so forth until the person behind the one who started the pushing is involuntarily pushing the one who started the pushing.
Such sequential time based imagery of the circular self-relativity when extended to the spherical space (the surface of sphere) loses its time dependency since an expanding hole is self-referentiality that has no sense of 'sequentiality', .. space and time are instead bound together in the dynamics of an expanding hole. That is, while individual pushing is in terms of a displacement in time, the pushing out of a hole is in terms a displacement in space.
If space is expanding,... at what 'rate' is it expanding? In order to determine this, we would have to be able to measure the displacement of space relative to another rigid reference space that 'contained' the expanding space that we were measuring and we would have to have an observer with a measuring instrument and a clock residing in the larger space, to make the measurements.
In spite of all of this, when the queen moves through the crowd, she is always at the center of an expanding hole.that does not have to be explained in terms of those inside the circle (i.e. the queen) pushing forward so that those others are pushed backwards, a decided 'linear' deconstruction since individuals are only capable of linear motion (a curvilinear trajectory is still linear).
Thus our experience informs us that we, as a collective are capable of simultaneous mutual influence based motion wherein we let our individual behaviour be in the service of opening up an expanding hole, ... a dynamical behaviour that cannot be reduced to terms of individual behaviour, confirming that the dynamics of social collectives transcend anything that can be explained in terms of the behaviours of the individual participants.
So why try to manage the dynamics of social collectives on the basis of prescribing and controlling the behaviours of individuals?
The answer is, because we can see the behaviours of individuals whereas the dynamical behaviour of collectives such as inner-outer expansion or contraction of space (the configuration of the collective) can only be felt. Like the drunk looking under the streetlight for the watch he has lost in the darkness, it is more convenient to look for things in a place where you can see things clearly and visibly, ... rather than having to 'feel your way around' in the absence of visibility.
To conclude this 'second epilogue', it is apparent from our real-life experience that the dynamical self-configuring behaviour of a social collective transcends anything that can be portrayed in terms of the behaviours of the individual participants, ... such behaviours at whatever micro or macro level one choses, being reduced to curvilinear displacements in time; i.e. displacements relative to an absolute containing space and relative absolute time. These are the constraints that are the price which must be paid to 'detach' the behaviour of the individual from its dynamical inclusion within the collective; i.e. if it doesn't have the enveloping dynamical collective to relate to anymore (while seen as on-its-own), then we have to substitute with the notion of an absolute space container that we can say that it moves relative to, plus the absolute clock that it moves relative to (rather than the self-organizing seasonal waves and pulses of the dynamical collective).
What we are missing in our rational models based on the behaviour of individual participants is the ability to use space (the shape of the dynamical configurations of the collective) as an intermediary that has an accommodative/suppressive influence on the outwelling/actualizing of individual behaviour, though this is demonstrated all the time, as is shown by the example story of Bogie and the Gipper.
The shape of space; i.e. the shape of the dynamical collective can go beyond the capabilities of the dynamical participant as we know when we give ourselves up to it in driving friendly on a crowded freeway, or as Humphrey Bogart and Lee J. Cobb gave themselves up to it. As individuals, we cannot assertively 'construct' an expanding hole in our collective, we must allow it to emerge through simultaneous mutual influence. Our notion of being in control is dependently based on time-based actions and logic, ...rational behaviours such as if she does that, I will do this. This 'control' based rational 'visual space' perception is too small to allow us to construct an expanding hole to open the way for the queen or to close down the way for the 'commie', ... we must instead access our feeling/intuitive 'acoustic space' perception for those applications.
Rational models based on the visible behaviour of individual participants in the dynamic of a social collective are no more than a radically incomplete simplified view that we impose on our mental modeling processes that are not imposed on nature, and using these as the basis for managing the dynamics of social collectives is getting us into a lot of trouble.
Only when we, the public at large, allow ourselves to become aware of the radical shortfall in the reductive rational models that we impose on our western view of the world (that are not imposed on nature), and acknowledge that our feeling/intuitive space-based perception and response is how the world really works, will we be able to transcend the mess we're getting ourselves deeper and deeper into. .
How will this manifest?
The notion that we are dependent upon government control hierarchy to keep order in the social collective will give way, since it is based on the rational model which artificially constrains our dynamical capabilities to terms of assertive behaviour.
We will realize that by managing on the basis of controlling individual behaviour we are blinding ourselves to the 'real' way that social dynamics are managed, through the intermediation of space which we sense through feelings/intuition. Thus what control hierarchy based management of social order blinds itself to is the role of space in accommodating/suppressing the outwelling/actualizing of our authentic behavioural potentials, and the fact that the intermediating of space can become suffocatingly suppressive of authentic behaviour. The creative behaviours lost to us due to a suppressive space and unseen story but not an unfelt story. What could have been is not something that we can articulate, only something that we can speculate about, ... and therefore not something that our justice system is going to deal with.
The celebration of Ronald Reagan as a wonderful person is one thing, but to confuse this with celebrating his actions as President, as the of a control hierarchy that conditioned space in the direction of seriously suppressing the outwelling/actualization of creative, social harmony nurturing/sustaining authentic behaviours is something else.
Lord Acton, speaking of 'liberty' and 'controlling class' said;
"By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his duty against the influences of authority and majorities, custom and opinion. ... Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end...liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition...The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to to govern. Every class is unfit to govern...Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
So long as we blind ourselves to the experience-validated reality of the over-riding role of dynamical space accessible through our feeling/intuition, and remain mired down in a belief that reality is adequately described in terms of the assertive behaviour of individuals, then we shall be denying ourselves the full power as a collective of our natural an-anarchic self-organizational capacities in the sustaining of community harmony within the authentic behaviour accommodating intermediation of our living space.