White Rock, July 7, 1999
http://rampages.onramp.net/~emlumley/warrior.htm
I am truly tired of the futility of 'explanation', ... of the puniness of words without action. I want to move deeper into the domain of 'doing' and let my actions give meaning to my words. I want to shift from the passive 'being' of philosophy to the active 'becoming' of warriorship. I am not talking about becoming a 'revolutionary' in the sense of a physically violent warrior, ... I am talking in terms of a walk-the-talk warrior whose dynamical interfacing with his environment is fully congruent with his spoken ideas.
I don't need any more lessons in physics or linguistics to convince me of what I already know, ... that the 'explicit', ... the 'thing' or the 'word' is an abstraction which takes its meaning from the containing environment of which it is a constituent-participant. The self-referential notion of being container and content at the same time is something our language 'doesn't like' because it involves 'inclusionary logic', yet those situations wherein the 'thing' is at the same time its own 'container' are the general case in nature, as exemplified by the sea which is, at the same time, its englobing atmosphere, ... the oceanosphere being an included interior sub-sphere of the atmosphere where the meaning of both spheres demands inclusionary reasoning (wind and waves are co-evolutionary and neither can be understood 'in their own, exclusionary right').
The principle of inclusion of the implicit environmental container and its explicit contents is general and applies both in the world of materials and the worlds of ideas, and whenever we open our mouths to disseminate a stream of word-labels abstracted as 'things in their own right', we are wrong. That means that as I write this note using an explicit-word based language, I am wrong, ...
You may have noticed that 'something happened' in the last sentence, in a geometrical or topological sense, ... that this essay became conscious of itself. Such evoking of an awareness of how our tools of understanding modulate our understanding is essential if we are to go to battle against the deepening dysfunction in our society. Our perspectives and our words are incomplete in themselves and therefore 'wrong'. We are always 'wrong' and our reasoned arguments as to why we are 'right' are always innately 'wrong'. In this context we are an 'autistic collective' because our views are the children of our experienced interplay with our containing environment, ... we co-imprint our containing environment as it co-imprints us, ... you can call this effect aboriginal 'mysticism' if you like, but it is also quantum physics. An Afrikaans nonlinear electronics engineer-turned-philosophy professor, Paul Cilliers, puts it this way, ... 'no 'complex system' (all real systems are complex) can be fully described, and all descriptions are 'culturally laden', ... being based on a particular perspective'. Thus, all views are 'wrong' and all statements are wrong because they are 'incomplete' and therefore open to our manipulation by the 'selectivity' inherent in perspective, wherein we consider only those space-time features which resonate with our experience and intent, ... i.e. we precipitate what we refer to as 'facts' by our selection of the point where our investigations cease.
'Smoking is good for you', as Jamshid Gharajedaghi notes, in putting this point across, ... it relieves anxiety and leads to weight reduction, and gives pleasure at the same time. When I smoke, as I sometimes do, I know this to be true, ... i.e. it is confirmable by experience (experimentation). What's wrong with this picture? Is it that Goedel's theorem says that all finite systems of logical propositioning are innately incomplete, and can come into conflict with themselves? How does this happen?
Let's open up the space-time aperture a bit more. If I keep smoking, ... my lungs will be effected and when they are effected, they will put a strain on my heart and it will be effected. What then, is this word 'smoking', ... it seems that to generalize what 'smoking' is, I have to split apart space and time and pretend that 'smoking' has meaning in itself, but in reality, 'smoking', like all 'things' seems to be a pattern of behavior which is interwoven with its own space-time containing environment, ... it is both 'good' and 'bad' at the same time depending on our viewing perspective and the space-time aperture we 'select'.
So what do we mean when we say that 'something' or 'someone' 'did' such-and-such?'. As philosophers, mathematicians and physicists, not to mention Taoists, agree, all such statements are 'wrong' due to their 'incompleteness', ... from the fact that one can never fully isolate a 'thing' from its relational interplay with its space-time container, ... interplay whose visualization is necessarily shaped by the observer's experience, ... his relational interplay with his space-time container. And as quantum physics asserts, nature is a unity, ... a single system which has 'no outside', ... thus our view of what is 'out there' (objectivity) and our experiential base needed to give meaning to our observations (subjectivity), blur one into the other and all causal declarations as to 'what is going on' in the world are 'wrong' because they are 'culture-laden', selective perspectives.
We know only too well how our Western culture uses this fundamental incompleteness in logical propositions to 'speak with forked tongue', ... to selectively 'color' statements and views, ... to put 'political spin' on meaning, and to mesmerize ourselves into believing them to be 'absolutely true', ... to forget about the culture-laden approximations we made to get to the notion of 'things' and to start guiding our actions on the artificial base of logical propositions out of the context of the implicit relational fields which engendered and gave them meaning.
A 'warrior for harmonic community' cannot accept logical propositions which fly in the face of their own engendering fields of implicit relational dynamics. The warrior must assess logical propositions, rules, laws, judgements of 'good' and 'bad' not 'in their own right', but on the basis of their enveloping and containing relational context. Logical propositions, rules, laws and judgements are the 'precipitates' of a community's implicit harmonic purpose and intent, and it is the implicit harmonic purpose and intent which must remain in the primacy over fixed euclidian logic structures. The warrior for harmonic community must rebel against the abuse of logical structures, ... against the inverted primacy of the explicit-in-its-own-right over the implicit relational dynamics from which the explicit was precipitated.
That the implicit relational dynamics which precipitate explicit views of reality are key to our understanding of complex reality is underscored by modern physics and evolutionary theory. Explicit 'things' or 'parts' take on different 'identities' by being associated with other ensembles of 'parts'; ... that is, the identity of 'things' is a function of our relational perspective, as is obvious from our different jargon (i.e. 'language games' as Wittgenstein says) in different disciplines which cover the same ground in different terms and models, and which challenge each other with respect to whose perspective can go farthest in developing an understanding of the world, ... a world which, according to all sciences, is manifestly a process of continual 'falling apart' and 'coming together', ... 'subducting' into the implicit and 'upwelling' into newly created explicit forms, ... "replacing function as quickly as it breaks down" (Mickulecky).
What 'persists' in nature and evolution is the implicit function rather than the explicit structure, ... our own physiological bodies are continually falling apart and coming together as the implicit functions which give the structures (cells, organs) their meaning persist. And so it must also be, even in the domain of 'rules', as noted by Oliver Wendell Holmes (in 'The Bar as a Profession'), ... "A system of law at any time is the resultant of present needs and present notions of what is wise and right on the one hand, and, on the other, of rules handed down from earlier states of society and embodying needs and notions which more or less have passed away."
As Cilliers and Dodds, Afrikaans philosophers, note, ... it is unethical to abdicate our own consciousness and simply 'follow-the-rules', ... it is unethical to become zombies in the logical gearworks of democracy allowing it to transform into a 'tyranny of the majority', ... a tyranny wherein behaviors are deemed 'correct' if they are consistent with 'innately incomplete' logical rules, where such 'correct' behaviors can be dishonest with impunity by being in conflict with the implicit intent of the logical rules; i.e. an intent which seeks to cultivate a harmonious, open and free containing space for the pursuit of happiness. Rules and rational structures intended to promote the free pursuit of cultural purpose, which are 'culture-laden' in a manner which suppresses minority cultural purpose, come into basic conflict with themselves. As mathematics (Goedel's theorem) has said, ... logical systems can be in conflict with themselves, ... thus logic and rule structures cannot be the 'last word' in guiding community towards harmony.
The incompleteness of logic is that it is concerned with explicit things out of the context of their englobing container, ... and it is impossible to cultivate harmony of the whole without equilibrating the rhythms within a system to the rhythms without (in the englobing space-time which contains the explicit thing). Computer logic can do wonderful things but as it does its computation, it can never be conscious of the space-time dynamics in its containing environment, ... it cannot stand on its own shoulders and see and account for itself and its environmental co-dynamics as it 'computes', a necessary capability for cultivating whole-and-part harmony. Such self-referential perception is a capability which transcends rationality but which comes naturally to all manner of natural systems, ... the sun, as it does 'its thing', in effect 'knows' it is at the center of the system of planets and behaves accordingly, ... we know, by means of 'geometrical-physical theorizing' ('by bringing a multitude of real and imaginary experiences into connection in our mind' ... 'Einstein') how we are relating to, and influencing the dynamics of our containing environment even as we do our own thing, ... we have the self-referential (co-evolutional) ability to dance to the music which emanates from our dancing, ... this is what community harmony is all about, particularly where we have communities within communities as in the open systems sense of a reefal ecology.
In physics, evolution, systems science, mathematics, philosophy, ethics and law, ... this self-referential Heraclitean view persists, ... of implicit purpose or function being the mother of explicit structure which continually falls apart and comes together in a continuing evolutionary dynamic or 'flow'.
The warrior for harmonic community must therefore look to the continually-evolving dynamic of the relational implicit for primary guidance rather than restrict his view to the literality of logical rules and propositions 'in their own right', and he must refuse to accept and conform to rules which are dissonant with respect to their own implicit intent. He must overtly expose and proclaim the insanity of putting the explicit child of our implicit intent into a primacy over its own englobing parent, ... putting the transient 'part' into a primacy over the continuing and containing 'whole' which includes the transient 'part'.
The view of the warrior must be based on 'inclusionary' reasoning, and the importance of being 'inclusionary' in going to battle has become very apparent to me. To fight for the return of honesty and inclusionary harmony in our society does not translate into the elimination of those who are 'wrong', but stimulates us to aggressively intervene where damage is being done because of a blind, unconscious reliance on rules and laws; i.e. the warrior must focus on behaviors rather than 'things'. In the domain of explicit perspectives we are all 'wrong' since our views are born of our particular and personal experience, and this is what ethnicity and culture is, ... a way of 'being wrong' [in a relativistic world, 'right and wrong' are subjective attributes and thus all perspectives are both 'right' and 'wrong'. Since we tend to think in terms of only one way to be 'right' but many ways to be 'wrong', it seems reasonable to label all culture-laden perspectives and rule systems as being 'wrong']. What we need is a society which respects authentic and honest 'wrong' views,... a society where warriors fight not for the imperialism of 'the right way', ... not as colonial missionaries of 'absolute good', but as champions of harmonic purpose wherein notions of 'right' and 'wrong' are recognized as being innately incomplete and 'culture-laden'.
We as warriors must resist the colonization of the human community by those who would forcefully prescribe 'the right way'. As Giordano Bruno said, ... 'the majority has no monopoly on the truth', ... and democracy which is operationalized as 'the tyranny of the majority' leads on to painful dissonance. Democracy must cultivate the harmony of the past and future of the world and all its species, ... it must be the democracy of implicit, evolutionary purpose and we must not allow laws to be put into a primacy over their own implicit, purposive intent, as is so often happening today. This is the message of Cilliers and Taiaiake and a growing number of harmonic warriors.
For me, the tam-tamming of warriorship is growing stronger by the day and what I envisage in my warriorship is congruent with that envisioned and practiced by Ed McGaa, an Oglala Sioux and Vietnam veteran who, after many combat missions in the war, transformed from physical warrior mode to what he calls 'mystic warrior'. It is this type of warrior he describes, ... a 'warrior for harmonic community' in my terminology, ... that I aspire to, and where he speaks on behalf of the red man, his word geometry applies equally to all men suffering under the yoke of western rationalist imperialism.
'We have seen the enemy and it is us', as the comicstrip Pogo says, ... alluding to the insanity of allowing our purposive consciousness to be dominated and enslaved by our own rationalist rules and logic, ... the precipitate of our purposive consciousness. This is occurring at all organizational levels in our rationalist culture dominated society, ... our youth must subordinate their own purpose to; "rules handed down from earlier states of society and embodying needs and notions which more or less have passed away.", or else be denied access to love, respect, societal privileges and resources for living. Thus youth in general is suffering from an aberrant cultural inversion which puts 'explicit structure' into a primacy over 'implicit purpose', .... the same geometry of affliction as suffered by aboriginal cultures.
McGaa describes the warrior as follows;
* * * * *
"A mystic warrior is concerned about the preservation of the natural way. We had our way taken from us and we were forbidden to do it. Now it is coming back. But in my time, when I was young, there were very few young men who stood up for the Indian way. Most of them were in the bars, and they were captured by the white man's drugs and the white man's alcohol. They were brainwashed in the white man's way by the boarding schools. They showed little attention towards the return of the natural way. The mystic warrior doesn't fight physically but speaks up against the crowd for a way of life and for our spirituality. The mystic warrior leads a life the great spirit would want you to live.
[In the Sioux tradition,] ...Warriors were observed by the people and the leadership emerged. Leaders were those who demonstrated bravery, good judgment, and provided for the people. They were those who made good decisions. A real leader had few possessions; they gave their possessions to the people. Leaders had to demonstrate loyalty, ethical ability, and honor.
...We recognize what is honorable, and we recognize what is unhonorable. It is just put inside of us. We recognize what is honorable and what is ethical. You have to put truthfulness away for the spirit world as you put food away for the winter. Humans get in trouble by bending truths. Being truthful is seeing the natural ways of life.
... The warrior is an unpopular archetype today. But the warrior is part of who we are--it cannot be wished away. If we try to banish the warrior from our psychic system, we drive our aggression underground into the unconscious where anger will find expression in destructive ways. The archetype is not the problem. The problem is our incompetence in facing the warrior within ourselves and others.
We need a more evolved definition of the warrior for today's world, and we need the warrior in each of us to assert itself fully, maturely, and courageously. We also need to be role-models and mentors to others, young and old, so that healthy warriors can lead us to fulfill our potential.
The warrior protects life and life's natural processes by going into the real world and standing between evil and innocence. The warrior alerts others to danger and mobilizes them to face reality and to take risks. The warrior protects the boundaries of the self and of the community from what is destructive. In spite of fear, pain, danger, difficulty, and personal cost, the warrior goes forward first.
The warrior weds power with values and strength with goodness. With self-discipline the warrior destroys the enemies of the true self, attacks those things that are cruel, abusive, damaging, and discouraging and confronts injustice and oppression. This creative destruction makes space for a more just creativity.
Warriors assert their authenticity and make the world a better place. Rosa Parks, a seamstress, was afraid when she sat at the front of the bus that day in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama. But one day she said no. She wouldn't stand so a white person could sit. Her feet were tired. Her soul was tired. She had endured enough. She would no longer live a divided life. She would not collaborate any longer with those who would deny her humanity. She didn't care what they did to her. She would not give up her seat at the front of the bus. And a movement began. All movements, large or small, begin with one person's moment of authenticity. Rosa Parks is a warrior.
Like Rosa Parks the warrior has a nobility of spirit and energy that inspires others to reach for greatness. The unmistakable values of truth, justice, integrity, and responsibility provide the strength to stand alone. Authenticity and courage emerge and grow from ongoing personal tests that challenge the warrior's character.
Warriors are often angry people. Their anger is forceful disapproval of lies told, trust betrayed, innocence violated, reality denied, power abused, and incompetence rewarded. They don't turn indifferent or deny their anger and become sadistic and abusive. True warriors engage their anger and use its energy to empower themselves and free others.
John Cowan wrote in Small Decencies:
I like people who are alive. People who are alive are hard to
control. They have ideas, aspirations, and feelings, including
anger. Nice people have the bad habit of letting me down. Nice
people don't offer me anything I have not thought of before.
Nice people don't save me from my mistakes. Nice people end
up acting on feelings they have always had but never wanted to
tell me about.
Warriors identify with life itself, and their honor brings forth courageous actions. The power of the warrior is of creation and destruction. Few have the audaciousness to destroy what needs to be destroyed in our lives and our organizations. Few possess the boldness to risk the creation of new forms. Despite the dangers of provoking the status-quo, true warriors accept their responsibility to make choices and to take decisive actions.
Our enterprises are filled with the walking dead: many who are indifferent, legions who comply and conform, those who claim entitlement and helplessness, countless who are small and petty and not a few villians. We desperately need warriors who will stand up, speak up, and take actions that remind us of our own best possibilities. And when they do, the rest of us need to strengthen them with our support.
Organizational warriors face their anxieties and go forward into uncertainty learning as the proceed. They confront twisted thinking. They live the values and vision of the enterprise and cross swords with those who do not. The warrior intercedes for the less powerful and helps others face the realities of the world and the organization. They lead and support others through transitions. They challenge mediocre performance at all levels. The warrior tells the truth and holds themselves and others accountable. They teach and mentor others in being a healthy warrior who serves the whole.
If marginalized by the forces for the status-quo, the organizational warrior leaves and continues the battle from another place. Rosa Parks was arrested and fired from her job in 1955. In 1999 she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, Congress' highest civilian honor, and hailed as "a living icon for freedom in America." We should fear less putting our positions at risk and trust more in our values and our abilities to adapt."
* * * *
I could not agree more with Ed McGaa, and I hope to move deeper and more intensively into the warriorship he describes, ... to confront twisted thinking, ... to live the values and vision of harmonic community and cross swords with those who do not, ... to intercede for the less powerful and help others deal with dissonant realities which resist transformation, ... to tell the truth and hold both myself and others accountable, ... to teach and mentor others in being a healthy warrior who serves the harmony of the whole.
My experience resonates with McGaa's, ... that our culture is becoming the culture of the walking dead, ... the many who are indifferent, ... legions who comply and conform, ... those who claim entitlement and helplessness, ... and others who are small and petty.
How many are we, who argue that our educational system gives lip-service to 'relational intelligence' while rewarding 'rational intelligence' in its own right, ... giving those with the highest exam scores, out of the context of their experiential 'performance' and their implicit contribution towards harmonic community, the resources (scholarships, bursaries) and access to societal privilege, ... and yet it goes on, this purification of rationalist humanity, to the point that old fashioned managers refer to new graduates as 'humilityless twits'. And still we as parents say to our children, 'you must score well at school to ensure your success. ... we cannot change the world overnight, ... we must have the wisdom to know what we can change and the courage to accept that which we can't change', ... and we withhold our love and respect from youth who passively resist or actively rebel at being forced into the unnatural win/lose education game until they either capitulate and conform, betraying a part of themselves in the process, or they 'twist off'. And then we question the rise in youth depression, drug and alcohol abuse, suicides and violence in the schools, .... and feign blindness to the damage inflicted by rationalist imperialism, ... 'that which we cannot change', ... and like the drunk who searches for the watch he lost on an unlit portion of the street under the streetlamp where the light is better, we look instead to genetics, television programming etc., which further tightens the demeaning gauntlet which stands between youth and the love, respect and resources they need.
Did Rosa Parks exercise the wisdom to discriminate between that which she could change and that which she couldn't? The very question reeks of innately incomplete exclusionary logic, and denies that we are constituent-participants in and of our experiential container. If whole-and-part form a unity, as our modern physics informs us, then there can be no absolute detachment between 'we' and 'that which needs change. The question itself is the artifact of a 'language game' which we must look through and beyond, as Rosa did. She, as an inclusionary part of the unity of life and community, decided she could no longer live in the self-betraying, conformant way, and her act of resistance, being part of the whole, changed the whole.
Warriors of community harmony do not make their children conform to inverted 'explicit-over-implicit' educational systems, nor do they support the continuance of such dysfunctional practice through their passivity, ... instead, they confront this twisted thinking and cross swords with those who would preserve it.
How many are we, who argue that the corporation and the global economy has inverted the natural priority of 'people as ends, wealth as means' and have become strip-miners and consumers of so-called 'human resources'? And how many of us quietly suck from its teat and bring to it the offerings it demands of us which sustain it and keep it healthy, rather than becoming warriors who go to battle against such twisted thinking? How many of us are like the pension plan administrators of unions which invest in those companies giving the biggest financial returns regardless of how their workers are treated? ... i.e. how many of us with invested savings bother to inquire into the degree to which our investments are nurturing the twisted logic of 'people as means, wealth as ends which we rail against?, ... how many of us attempt to shift our investments to those enterprises with a stronger tendency to practice the natural polarity of 'people as ends, wealth as means' as many of the old mom&pop businesses used to do?
How many are we, who argue that our rationalist control hierarchies, the mainstay of western organizational design, in business and in politics, are being subject to the abuse of power, ... where positions of authority ordained by the community for the community, are being used to amplify the personal views and power of the incumbent,.... views promulgated and defended on the basis of 'what is right' or 'what is best' out of the context of the englobing community, whether this be at the scale of local community or nation? And how many of us, instead of going to battle against this twisted behavior, simply accept it under the terms of 'having the wisdom to know what things we cannot change', ... instead of becoming warriors who challenge such behaviors and cross swords with those who make no attempt to live the vision and values of harmonic community?
McGaa observes that; "The warrior is an unpopular archetype today. But the warrior is part of who we are--it cannot be wished away." But McGaa's warrior is not the warrior of the western culture, who sees 'winning' in the exclusionary terms of 'elimination' of the opponent, and is a recognized source of social dysfunction, i.e.; in "The Psychoanalytic Roots of Patriarchy: The Neurotic Foundations of Social Order ", the power of the heroic [warrior] myth in pathological situations can be significant, i.e.; "The Heraclean complex "aims not at active or passive symbiosis but at elimination of its object.... I can escape the feeling of my own powerlessness in comparison with the world outside myself by destroying it."Heracles was the greatest of the Greek heroes, and was the only hero to achieve godhood. He was the son of Zeus and Alcmene, and the great-grandson of Perseus. While he had several wives, he was no friend of women and was often in conflict with them. He began life by crushing a pair of serpents with his bare hands while still in the crib. (The snake or serpent is one of the symbols of the Goddess, and artistic depictions of Heracles holding a snake in each hand call to mind the goddess figurines found at the palace of Knossos in Crete.) In a fit of madness, he killed his wife and children. He was a member of the brotherhood of heroes that made up the Argonauts, the crew of the ship Argo. As the archetypal hero, he seems an appropriate mythical figure to give his name to the destructive misogynous drives in males which generate such activities as rape and multicide, and exclude women from the various brotherhoods, whether military, scholastic, or religious."
'Warriors' in the western patriarchal world manifest the somatic imperialism of zero-sum 'win-lose' geometry, and the term 'warrior' and 'warrior dynasty' are often heard in the context of organizational control hierarchies where the 'game' is one of amassing power through domination of others, rather than through respect (as manifest, for example, in the so-called MADness of mergers, acquisitions and downsizings which typically eliminate existing ecological patterns, and impose their own 'imperialistic story' in its place). As Taiaiake Alfred points out in 'Peace, Power, Righteousness', the western realist [rationalist] notion is that power resides in force and that power is employed from a position of dominance. Seen in terms of two 'end members', the rationalist 'warrior' is one who draws his power from hierarchical 'office' (the explicit) and substitutes this 'bureaucratic persona' for real personality and accountability, while the intuitive warrior of McGaa draws his power from the inclusionary and implicit (community respect).
But it is not an exclusionary question of one OR the other, but the inclusionary balance of one AND the other, since those who are respected are generally given honorary positions (e.g. 'Elder', 'Chief' etc.) which carry with them the power of position, whether or not it is employed as such. This balance in the sourcing of power was spoken to by Francis Fukuyama observes in his book 'Trust', i.e.; it was "... highly sociable' (trusting) Americans who pioneered the development of the modern corporation, but things have changed radically since that time ... 'By contrast, people who do not trust one another will end up cooperating only under a system of formal rules and regulations, which have to be negotiated, agreed to, litigated, and enforced, sometimes by coercive means. This legal apparatus, serving as a substitute for trust, entails what economists call 'transaction costs'." Fukuyama points out that the modern 'warrior', unlike his former 'win/lose' counterpart, is the respected leader of the 'keiretsu' or moral network, a profile similar to that of McGaa.
'Transaction costs' are indeed on the rise, ... as our society experiences rising contention between the 'warriors of the implicit' as in the Sioux exemplar, and the 'warriors of the explicit' as is in the primacy in our western 'dominator' culture. In the event of major systemic failures in the Y2K passage, we may see this conflict come to a head as the 'warriors of the implicit' battle the 'warriors of the explicit', the former employing power derived from 'respect, honour, pride and courage' to achieve, on a 'people-first' priority, the restoring of the health of the local community, while the latter employ their power of 'office' to achieve, on a logic-first priority, the restoring of the health of the corporate enterprise.
In the yin/yang inclusionary view of reality, however, both of these ordering mechanisms exist simultaneously as do both of the warrior states, even within a single personage, ... i.e. no one can know the relative extent to which people respond to established leadership from the explicit, force-based 'power of office' versus the implicit attractor-based 'power of identity'. As Nietzsche says, "the belief in purpose collapses with the belief in cause", .... and to paraphrase Richard Feynman in his general formulation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, ... 'no equipment can be built to simultaneously determine which of two alternatives was taken without destroying their interference pattern.'
But what we do know is that the 'explicit' is the 'precipitate' of the implicit, .... the containing 'ether' of community engenders the explicit structure, just as the containing atmosphere engenders the oceans, and this gives an inclusionary rather than exclusionary geometry which must be considered in one's 'warriorship'. That is, the warriors of 'environmentalism' and 'feminism' seek to 'eliminate' the current regime and replace it, and thus they represent a new form of colonialism and imperialism, but 'colonialism and imperialism' nevertheless, which is still based on power which resides in force and management by domination via control hierarchies.
The warriorship advocated by Ed McGaa and Taiaiake Alfred seems to be equivalent to the 'elan vital' or 'quantum vitalism' of evolution, wherein the 'container' transforms itself (the whole) by swallowing its own contents, ... by being reborn inside of a new and larger story. As one of the youthful presenters at the Asilomar ISSS meeting suggested, ... we are at a point in time where the geometry of conflict is similar to that which existed a billion years ago, when prokaryotic lifeforms were generating so much oxygen that they were burning up in it, ... their own creativity threatening to drive them to extinction. The result was that the prokaryotes transformed into eurkaryotes by 'swallowing themselves', ... the prokaryotic forms being 'included' in the new forms, as organelles or subfunctions within the more complex organism. [This same swallowing process seems to have occured in the case of the tetrahymena forms in our peptide receptors and the paramecium forms in our neural structures]. She pointed out that our great productivity in technology-leveraged rationality seemed to be threatening humankind with extinction, and that perhaps we were at the juncture where our human reasoning would cease its relentless 'optimization' of the explicit, rationalist colonialist strains and transform by 'swallowing itself', ... our rational reasoning being 'included' in the new, richer mode of reasoning, this time as a subfunction within the more complex reasoning process.
Evolution seems to have equipped homo sapiens with intuition (implicit understanding) and rationality (explicit understanding) packaged within a dipolar unity. That the 'explicit-over-implicit' polarity experienced 'runaway feedback' which has taken us to the edge of extinction does not seem at all far-fetched, viewed against what is now known of the evolutionary process. Whether or not we can 'swallow' our colonialist reasoning seems to be a separate issue, as we know that many species have been stopped in their tracks by the challenges which come from the containing whole in and of which they are constituent-participants.
From this evolutionary vantage point, 'becoming a warrior for community harmony' and 'becoming a mystic warrior' takes on the more general meaning of 'becoming a warrior for evolution', ...by tuning in to, and living the elan vital or quantum vitalism of evolution. Evolution seems to be the continuing ouroborical process of environmental-container- swallowing- its-contents, co-transforming both in the process. In this regard, the mission of the 'warriors of the implicit' will be to encourage society to 'swallow' their rationalist, colonialist control hierarchies without chewing, including them in a supportive rather than primary role within the newly transformed structure, ... the 'purposeful system' in the terminology of Ackoff and Gharajedaghi, ... the third generation of human regulatory design schema, the first being fabrication which was swallowed alive by the control hierarchy or cybernetic model which is now being swallowed alive by the purposiveful organization in an inclusionary spheres-within- spheres geometry.
To summarize:, ... in the face of rising societal dysfunction, the warriors of the explicit, i.e. the warriors of rationalist imperialism, are fighting amongst themselves over the 'best' brand of colonialism to impose on the world, seemingly unaware that the dysfunction emanates from 'runaway feedback' and overspecialization in rational control structures themselves. What is emerging at the same time is the 'warrior of the implicit' who seeks not to eliminate his opponent but to swallow him alive, true to the fractal nature of the evolutionary process, wherein 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' (the evolution of the individual replicates the evolution of the species). Since we ourselves are inherent constituent-participants in the containing whole, ... as water molecules are to a flowing river, ... how we respond to our self-imposed environmental challenges (we are the containing environment and its contents at the same time) will, by definition, determine our evolutionary future.
I am persuaded that it is time to accept our 'warrior of the implicit' leadership responsibility. As Taiaiake Alfred says; "Along with new leaders, a new leadership ethos grounded in tradition [i.e. an inclusionary view of space-time] must be put in place, one that promotes accountability to the people through the revival of traditional decision-making processes. We must be educated both in the ways of our ancestors and in the new knowledge and skills required to carry our communities forward. And, most urgently, we must begin to re-recreate a place of honour and respect within our societies for young people." ... "All actions in this effort --- not just our own but those of everyone who supports us --- must be inspired and guided by four principles. First, undermine the intellectual premises of colonialism [this and my other essays hopefully contribute to this principle]. Second, act on the moral imperative for change. Third, do not cooperate with colonialism. Fourth and last, resist further injustice. Decolonization will be achieved by hard work and sacrifice based on these principles, in concert with the restoration of an indigenous political cultural within our communities."
As Paul Cilliers says in his presentation 'Complexity, Ethics and Justice', ... 'It is often necessary to be nasty to be ethical' and as Ed McGaa says, in a similar vein; "Warriors are often angry people. Their anger is forceful disapproval of lies told, trust betrayed, innocence violated, reality denied, power abused, and incompetence rewarded. They don't turn indifferent or deny their anger and become sadistic and abusive. True warriors engage their anger and use its energy to empower themselves and free others."
I am directing my own 'warrior anger' towards helping youth transform the anger they feel towards society (and often direct towards themselves) into evolutionary purpose and the respect, honour, pride and courage which it induces.
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[1] Ed McGaa, an Oglala Sioux, was born and raised on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota. The son of strong parents, he grew up gifted and secure:
That is probably why I can take flack and it doesn't bother me.
I have a strong background in my mother and my father.
Ed's (Eagle Man) development was nurtured by mentors such as Ben Black Elk, son of Black Elk, and an involved extended family:
He (Ben Black Elk) set the seeds because he always talked
about his father's book when I was little. My mother had a
couple of sisters who played a strong role in my life. All my
brothers saw combat in World War II so when I was a little
boy I had these heroes, real live heroes, who would write letters
back to me.
I have always been blessed with mentors. The spirit world put
mentors in my life. I attended St. John's University and a couple
of Benedictine priests took me under their wing. Later Fools
Crow and Bill Eagle Feather were honorable men to look up to.
Ben Rifle was a congressmen who talked me into leaving the
Marines to attend law school. Now I am older and my mentors
are dead, but they are still here with me. I feel their presence.
As a Marine pilot Ed flew over one-hundred combat missions in Viet Nam. He earned a law degree from the University of South Dakota and is the author of many books including: Mother Earth Spirituality, Native Wisdom: Perceptions of the Natural Way, and Eagle Vision: Return of the Hoop.
Upon returning from Viet Nam he was a leader in restoring Native American spiritual practices to his reservation. He shifted from being a physical warrior to a mystic warrior.
(... profile of Ed McGaa excerpted from 'The Warrior' by Tom Heuerman, PH.D. with Diane Olson, PH.D. @1999. ... thanks Jan!)
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