White Rock, July 15, 1999
http://rampages.onramp.net/~emlumley/boundary.htm
As I drove off the ferry at Tsawassen, after meeting with Taiaiake Alfred on the Island, something new caught my eye, ... highway signs which warned that speed laws were being enforced by photo-radar. It struck me that the effect of this law Enforcement by Photo-Radar was somehow related to dysfunction in our society, ... i.e. that this 'EPR effect' somehow underscored Laborit's assertion that "we are witness to the reign of the bureacrat and technocrat who believe that their 'little game' is the whole game".
It is said that the unmanned aspect of EPR makes it a 'cash cow' for the government of British Columbia, but something is being sacrificed, and that 'something' seems to me to be 'consciousness'. A week before, I had passed through automated radar in the hills of Oregon which had said, ... "your speed is 69 miles per hour" along with a message giving me the guideline speed of 55 mph for the upcoming curve. In this case, technology was being used in a purpose-oriented sense, to cultivate my greater consciousness of the safety and harmony of my behavior. I had seen these alternative options of EPR type 'negative feedback' (control-based systems regulation) and Oregon radar-warning type 'positive feedback' (resonance-based systems regulation) before, ... in my studies of high performance teams.
'You are doing 69 miles per hour and the safe speed for this corner you are entering is 55 miles per hour', .... gives the harmonious feeling that 'implicit-over-explicit' statement tend to give, where the explicit components 'you are doing 69 mph' and 'the safe speed for this corner is 55 mph' are simply in the service of the implicit 'story' which, rather than being 'spelled out' , emerges from 'bringing a multitude of real and imaginary experiences into connection in the mind.' There was an implicit recognition embodied in this setup that the purpose of living together in security and harmony had to come out of the consciousness of the individual, ... that the negative feedback of tickets and fines was not the only technocratic-bureaucratic approach one could take.
Back here in British Columbia, however, the profitable EPR program underscored the growing detachment from purpose and re-orientation to economic goals. In the middle was John Q. Pavlovsdog, who is everywhere being wired up for shock treatment to condition his brain, on each occasion that he steps over some techno-bureacratic control boundary, purportedly implemented in support of community purpose. This issue of the discreteness and mechanical management of boundaries seemed to me to be interwoven with the whole story of 'community as complex system', as well as with the 'indigenous manifesto' of Taiaiake Alfred.
As the complaining faction at the systems sciences meeting at Asilomar had asserted, ... the rewards in our society are for 'rational intelligence' while 'relational intelligence' gets lip service. And it has certainly been my experience in business that what is rewarded is 'rational results' (material output) far moreso than 'relational results' (harmonic output). One might say that our society employs an inverted primacy in 'rewarding' rational results and expecting 'relational results' to follow rather than 'rewarding' relational results and expecting 'rational results' to follow (as occurs in high performance teams).
Well, it is clear that systems of rewarding (or punishing) the 'rational' are all about 'things', 'thing-properties' and 'thing-behaviors'. On the other hand, it is equally clear that systems of rewarding (or punishing) the 'relational' are all about 'boundaries' and 'boundary-properties' and 'boundary behaviors'. 'Things' are categories defined by generalizing 'properties' and 'behaviors', with varying degrees of attributional dimensionality; i.e. a the 'human' thing-category can be generalized in progressive detail by adding 'dimensions' such as the properties of skin color (red, white, black, yellow), gender (female, male), ancestry or lineage (sioux, negro, caucasian), language spoken (francophone, anglophone) and so on. Thus, there is a dimensional granularity to the boundary between 'things' which fall within the categorizational schema and those 'things' which fall outside of it.
Perhaps we can learn something about 'community as complex system' and systemic harmony and dysfunction, by reconciling the nature of 'boundaries' and 'things' with commonly used models and assumptions. For example, what does the boundary 'look like' between 'accident-causers' and 'non-accident-causers' with respect to the 'speed-exceeder' property?, ... i.e. a driver can't be in his most aware 'relational state' (harmony amplifying state) and have his eyes continually glued to the speedometer as well. This conflict is most apparent on a motorcycle, where one's survival instinct takes over from rule conformance, and one puts an alertness to traffic flow patterns and moving into safer flow-pockets within them, in a primacy over speed rules. This type of conscious behavior is evolutionary and adaptive and almost impossible to generalize, yet it is somehow important to our purpose of safe and harmonious travel. Since we are limited in defining complex system behaviors solely in terms of 'thing-behaviors', we may extend our insights into purpose, not simply by examining the 'things' in ever greater detail, but by examining the 'boundaries' between the 'inside' space containing our categorized definitions of 'things' and the 'outside' 'not-thing' space.
In studying 'boundaries', ...the essence of 'relational intelligence', some general questions arise with respect to the texture (granularity) and dimensionality of the notion of being 'inside' and/or 'outside' of the generalized thing space. If I draw a circle in the sand and speak of the grains which are 'inside' members versus those which are 'outside', the nature of the boundary would seem to be one-dimensional (a line or smooth curve such as a circle, as opposed to a two dimensional surface boundary as the areal skin on a sphere or an even higher dimensional boundary as represented by the space occupied by a doughnut-hole which goes through, wraps around, and envelopes the dough part of the doughnut. Thus, questions of topological dimensionality emerge from a study of thing boundaries.
For example, the eastern coastline of the US, as seen on a world globe, looks like a fairly smooth line some two or three thousand miles long. If one splices together the US coastal navigation charts, the curve becomes a very complex ten or twelve thousand miles long. If you were to walk it, staying within a step of the water, the length would rise to about fifteen thousand miles, and if an ant were to walk it, staying within one ant width from the water, the length would rise further, to about thirty thousand miles. The 'dimensionality' of some boundaries, then, rises with respect to its 'geometry' and its length and detail changes as a function of how we examine it. In the case of curved boundaries, their geometry can move upwards from the one-dimensional aspect of a smooth line, towards the two dimensionality of a surface as the curve becomes more tortuous, and such a boundary will have a 'fractional dimension' somewhere between 1.0 dimensional and 2.0 dimensional; e.g. 1.31 dimensional (i.e. the boundary will be a 'fractal').
From the point of view of understanding 'community as complex system', not simply in terms of a set of 'people-things' or set of 'people-thing-behaviors' but also in terms of the nature of the boundaries between such sets of things, the 'fractal dimensionality' we are speaking of is associated with the 'degree of freedom' associated with the boundary. If we put white paint on the front wheel of our bicycle and ride along with the intention of painting a one-dimensional (straight line) boundary, all we have the freedom to do is to slow down and speed up without turning, but if our intention is to paint a fractal boundary (e.g. 1.4 dimensionality), we are then free to not only slow down and speed up but also to veer right and left (as is convenient when going up a hill or to keep our balance), thus the fractal dimension of a boundary associates also with the notion of the rigidity of constraint of he who 'intends it' or 'experiences it'; i.e. a one dimensional boundary is much more constraining than a 1.4 dimensional fractal boundary. The same principles apply in the domain of volumetric space; i.e. the shape of a mountain lies somewhere between 2.0 dimensional (a cone) and 3.0 dimensional depending on the rugosity of its surface. Again, the tightness of constraint of intending or experiencing a boundary relates to the freedom with which its interior space relates to its englobing (exterior) space.
The world of the 'relational' then, is the world which focuses on the understanding of boundaries, and involves topological notions, such as 'fractals', 'attractors' and 'attractor basins', which tie in directly with the notion of 'purpose' (as spoken to implicitly by Nietzsche).
Coming back to the issues of 'community' and 'relational intelligence' then, the nature of the boundary between 'things' varies as a function of the 'depth' with which we choose to perceive or experience the boundary. In real life, boundaries are 'fractal' and this means that we never get to a discrete boundary, but that we keep descending through finer and finer detailed texture without 'bottoming out', as in the Mandelbrot set, seemingly supporting Zeno's paradox that things cannot move (i.e. we can never get to the boundary between a thing and its surrounding space so as to move across it.). Clearly, the problem is not that 'motion is impossible' but that 'thing-generalization is impossible', and this is because, as quantum physics suggests, nature is in its essence, evolutionary flow and function (the implicit) while the explicit notion of 'things' is a derived approximation or artifact of our 'mental model' (i.e. the explicit is a precipitate of the implicit). Because the nature of boundaries is so subtle, it is useful, BUT ONLY AS A PERCEPTUAL LADDER AND COMMUNICATIONS EXPEDIENT, NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH REALITY, to pass over such subtlety, saying things like 'let's just call a spade a spade'; i.e. 'let's go with the generalization and ignore the subtlety of the boundary'. To act upon such an approximate view which sees boundaries as discrete, as if it truly constituted reality, is a western cultural affliction which leads on to chronic pathologies.
In order to deal with the pathologies, then, it is imperative that we revisit the misleading assumption that the world is a world of 'things', and our western belief (delusion) that we can build an accurate view of the world upwards from the notion of generalized discretely bounded 'things' and their discrete 'thing-properties'.
This discrete-boundary 'rational intelligence' based view of the world leads directly to regulatory systems based on control hierarchy (negative feedback),... an approach which excels in imposing order through control, out of the context of boundary-relationships and informational exchanges between the 'inner' and the 'outer' (e.g. as in the ordering information exchanges between 'winds' and 'currents' in the 'el-nino' dynamic, across the inclusionary boundary between 'atmosphere' and 'oceanosphere'). Control hierarchies emerge since the discrete-boundary notion gives us a view of things as being detached and purposeless (un-influenced by attractors), therefore, it is not a question of steering things which are being moved in attractor fields, but of imposing order on a purposeless ensemble.
In the western culture, 'success' has come to mean the inducing of desired order, out of the context of boundary behaviors and the harmony of whole-and-part. Thus, we see the rise to global dominance of the western perceptual and regulatory approach being framed in the internally-defined terms of the 'successfulness' of the system, out of the context of the rising and unintended whole-and-part dissonance which has manifestly gone hand-in-hand with such 'success'.
Those cultures such as the redman's, which put harmony of whole-and-part in a primacy over man-desired ordering wants, ... cultures embracing inclusionary reasoning based perception and regulatory approaches, ... come into basic conflict with the western culture and its exclusionary reasoning based practice, which builds upon the absolutist notion of 'progress', ... of moving from 'worse' to 'better' by excluding 'bad' thing-behaviors and concentrating the 'good' thing-behaviors. This 'exclusionary' view is incompatible with the view which sees all 'things' and 'thing-behaviors' in terms of inner-space/out-space boundary dynamics (e.g. 'co-resonances').
Examining the issues via the nature of boundaries informs us that there is a price to pay in blithely skipping across these boundaries whose fractal nature makes them 'implicit' rather than 'explicit'. The ignoring of the subtleness of meeting of 'inside space' with 'outside space' leads to the western habitude of 'judging' things solely on the basis of the 'explicit', ... on the basis of the inner 'facts in themselves' out of the context of the outer space-time dynamical container which gives co-evolves the 'fact', and co-defines the fractal boundary between the two. Our perceiving of the world, then, at its very roots, is tautological and boundary-based, beginning with the child's undifferentiated view of whole-and-self which gives way via inclusionary reasoning ('the bringing into connection in the mind a multitude of real and imaginary experiences') to an implied boundary between self and englobing space-time container. The 'self' becomes the interface between the 'self' and the rest of the world (i.e. it is tautologically 'bootstrapped').
Returning to the EPR speed limit enforcement example, one might revisit the 'raison d'etre' for speed laws; i.e. safe and harmonious vehicular travel. This 'purpose', ... the 'attractor-pulled', co-resonant boundary-based relationship between the driver and the container he is driving within, would seem to underly the consciousness and care which he brings to bear to ensure the harmony of part and whole, ... car and traffic, the contained world of passengers in his car and the world outside, ... yet such a view cannot be discovered in a voyeuristic EPR snapshot and the snapshot must instead be interpreted in terms of gross causal generalizations or 'facts'. In this sense, then, the EPR approach manifests the archetypical geometry of the western culture which puts gross generalization and 'rational intelligence' in the primacy over high dimensional perception and 'relational intelligence'. As technology is evolved, it is possible to apply it either to the cultivation of 'relational intelligence' (as in the Oregon radar example) and/or to an intensification of the control structures associated with 'rational intelligence' based ordering systems. In a given situation, however, the latter use of technology precludes the former though the former use does not preclude the latter (i.e. one can 'ask questions first and shoot second' but one cannot 'shoot first and ask questions second').
Regulation EPR style, is a 'shoot first and ask questions second' approach, often dictated by issues of economics rather than justice, which produces a 'mixed kill', including what are known as 'false positives' (in the terminology of statistical diagnosis). That is, if an individual is a member of a sub-population which has a high incidence of crime (e.g. as occurs with blacks and drug-related crime, and with speeders and accidents), it is more economical to focus prevention efforts on those sub-populations which are more highly correlated with the crime (more convictions per dollar will result). Of course, those innocent members of the sub-population, the so-called 'false positives', will suffer far more harassment than the average citizen, and will tend to be driven towards 'outlaw-hood' (e.g. the conscious driver may invest in a radar detector, and the black man may buy a handgun.). Thus, the imposed ordering via control structures, the way of 'rational intelligence', can come into conflict with itself, as Goedel's theorem suggests.
The general principle here is that the 'false positives' in the 'mixed kill' may, through the provocation of imposed rule structures, react against regulation itself by resisting conformance in another situation or locale and thereby inducing a net increase in regulatory structure overhead (i.e. inducing a vicious cycle of regulatory growth).
This was indeed the case with most of the teen-agers I 'hung around with' in my teenagehood, whose distinctive cars, 'clunkers', vintage models or souped-up jobs, were always being stopped by the police if on the road after midnight and searched for alcohol (i.e. for underage drinking, and drinking-while-driving offenses), while adults in their more conservatively styled vehicles enjoyed free passage. I and my friends, beer-drinkers all, resented this discriminatory treatment, and this resentment polarized us against the police and led some of members of the ensemble deeper into the zone of outlaw-hood. This issue of discrimination by categorical generalization and the 'false positives' associated with it is transparently obvious to youth. When a friend in that era was picked up and questioned while carrying a gasoline can and siphoning hose, on suspicion of stealing gas, he commented on this transparency by sarcastically protesting; 'you might as well arrest me for rape too, since I'm carrying the necessary equipment for that, as well.'
The pilot who flies over the east coast, ... the man who walks the coastline and the ant which crawls along the boundary, because they experience the boundary differently, will differ in their opinions of what falls within the boundary and outside of the boundary. This means that the population of 'false positives' will be different in each case. Since the ant's-eye-view will be most discriminating, and the pilot's the most generalized, we can see that we have the choice of moving inwards 'into the boundary' from the outer endstate of being a remote voyeur to the inner endstate of 'being the boundary' (experiencing the co-resonance at the interface overcomes the problem of 'false-positives').
This 'experiencing the boundary' is what is practiced by the exercise of 'becoming a grain of sand', utilized by my Abenaki friend in Bar des Pins and discussed in an earlier essay. In the limit, when we 'are the boundary interface', ... we 'implicitly' 'know' what is 'inside' and resonant with purpose and what is 'outside' which our purpose must be brought into co-resonance with. In this 'experiencing the boundary' mode, the inside space of purpose is 'us' and the outside space of non-purpose is what is outside of us (the rest of the world). In this 'relationally intelligent' sensing state, the notion of 'purpose' and 'self' come together in our consciousness, and we can 'act' out of our purposiveness. There is no 'bottom' to the depth of this consciousness, just as there is no 'bottom' to the detail in a fractal, the geometry which characterizes 'real life'. This is, indeed, the selfsame process out of which the 'self' evolves.
But back in the domain of western 'rationalism', where the boundaries to our generalizations are seen in voyeur mode and our policing of the boundaries, dictated by rationalist regulatory process, becomes a question of economics, the treatment of 'false positives' becomes an economic one. The following comments from a report on crime prevention and technology provide some insight therein;
* * *
"Studies in the late 1960s--when crime was again high and rising--revealed that many violent criminals had an extra Y chromosome and thus an extra set of "male" genes. "It was a dark day for science in Boston when they started screening babies for it," recalls Xandra O. Breakefield, a geneticist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Subsequent studies revealed that although XYY men tend to score lower on IQ tests, they are not unusually aggressive.
False Positive ID:
Social science studies on the causes of crime have been less controversial, in part because they have focused more on populations than on individuals. But as consensus builds among criminologists on a few key facts, researchers are assembling these into prediction models that try to identify the juveniles most likely to lapse into delinquency and then into violent crime.
Perhaps their most consistent finding is that a very small number of criminals are responsible for most of the violence. One study tracked 10,000 males born in Philadelphia in 1945 for 27 years; it found that just 6 percent of them committed 71 percent of the homicides, 73 percent of the rapes and 69 percent of the aggravated assaults attributed to the group.
Preventing just a small fraction of adolescent males from degenerating into chronic violent criminals could thus make a sizable impact on the violent crime rate, which has remained persistently high since 1973 despite a substantial decline in property crime. (Females accounted for only 12.5 percent of violent crime in 1992.) "For every 1 percent that we reduce violence, we save the country $1.2 billion," Raine asserts.
The problem, says Terrie E. Moffitt, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin who is conducting long-term delinquency prediction studies, is that "a lot of adolescents participate in antisocial behavior"--87 percent, according to a survey of U.S. teens. "The vast majority desist by age 21," she says. The dangerous few "are buried within that population of males trying out delinquency. How do you pick them out? Our hypothesis is that those who start earliest are at highest risk."
Marion S. Forgatch of the Oregon Social Learning Center tested that hypothesis on 319 boys from high-crime neighborhoods in Eugene. Last November at the American Society of Criminology meeting, she reported her findings: boys who had been arrested by age 14 were 17.9 times more likely to become chronic offenders than those who had not, and chronic offenders were 14.3 times more likely to commit violent offenses. "This is a good way of predicting," she says.
Good is a relative term. For if one were to predict that every boy in her study who was arrested early would go on to commit violent crimes, one would be wrong more than 65 percent of the time. To statisticians, those so misidentified are known as false positives. "All of these predictors have a lot of false positives--about 50 percent on average," says Akers, who recently completed a survey of delinquency prediction models. Their total accuracy is even lower, because the models also fail to identify some future
criminals.
The risk factors that Akers says researchers have found to be most closely associated with delinquency are hardly surprising. Drug use tops the list, followed by family dysfunction, childhood behavior problems, deviant peers, poor school performance, inconsistent parental supervision and discipline, separation from parents, and poverty. Numerous other controlled studies have found that alcoholism, childhood abuse, low verbal IQ and witnessing violent acts are also significant risk factors. Compared with violent behavior, however, all these experiences are exceedingly common. The disparity makes it very difficult to determine which factors are causes and which merely
correlates." ("Trends in Behavioral Science: Predicting Violent Crime." SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN March 1995 Volume 272 Number 3 Pages 100-107)
* * *
Given a particular purpose, such as harmonious (safe) vehicular travel, or harmonious, crime-free living, one has the option of cultivating care and consciousness in the populace to achieve such purpose (positive feedback), and/or of using rule structures enforced by control hierarchies (negative feedback). The former is achieved via 'relational intelligence', ... by descending into the boundary between those things which most resonate with our purpose and those things which least resonate (dissonate) to the point that we 'become the interface and the regulatory medium'. In this mode, our very 'navigational movements' becomes the cultivators of purposive harmony and this is visible to others and opens the way to 'modeling' in the psychological sense of the term, inducing others to descend into the 'becoming the boundary' as well. This 'relational intelligence' mode bypasses generalizations since 'generalization' emanates from a voyeur view, rather than from an immersed view in which we implicitly 'know' and 'become' the differentiator. That is, our manner of 'differentiation' moves from being a 'rational way of acting with respect to what's out there' to becoming a relational way of responding to 'what's in here' relative to 'what's out there' (and we move from structured 'individualism' to co-evolving our individuality).
The question arises, in regard to 'relational' and 'rational' intelligence, as to which to put into the primacy over the other, and this question associates with whether one views the system in the voyeur terms of 'problems' and their elimination (purification or progress from 'worse-to-better'), ... an exclusionary reasoning approach which is dominant in western culture, ... or whether one views the system in terms of 'inner-outer co-resonances' and their cultivation, an inclusionary reasoning approach which has been dominant in the traditions of aboriginals, Celts and Buddhists, but which has been delegated to a secondary role in the west.
Exclusionary reasoning, such as underpins traffic law Enforcement by Photo-Radar, by being explicitly communicable, removes the dependency on 'trust' which is inherent in inclusionary reasoning due to its innate 'implicitness'; i.e. one cannot articulate the ordering schema which derives from "bringing into connection in the mind a multitude of real and imaginary experiences". The shifting from the basis of trust to the mechanical compliance with explicit rules also detaches a person from his direct connection with 'purpose', the need to cultivate co-resonances between 'inner space' and 'outer space'. But this purposive intermediation between inner purpose and outer environmental behaviors is the same process which engenders and evolves the 'self', thus the shift to the primacy of 'rational intelligence' over 'relational intelligence' subordinates the 'evolving of one's individuality' to the mechanical fabrication of culturally correct 'individualism'. The radar setup in the Oregon hills, by contrast with the EPR implementation, helps the driver to descend into the boundary between harmony and dissonance, ... it helps him to 'become' the boundary and to act so as to put the 'inner space' of his purpose into resonance with the 'outer space' of his environment.
Meanwhile, the fact that the rules do not allow one to pump one's own gas at service stations in Oregon suggests that negative feedback controls are still 'the rule' in our society and positive feedback catalysis, the exception.
The 'false positive' effect associated with the predominant negative feedback 'explicit-over-implicit' regulatory approach of the West associates with a 'tyranny of the majority' mode of democracy which dulls the consciousness and responsibility of citizens and cultivates suspicion in the place of trust. In exceptional, high performance teams, as in the traditional ways of the aboriginal cultures, the culture default constituted by the 'explicit' approach is 'swallowed' by the higher dimensional 'implicit' approach. In terms of the fractal curve, the voyeur view of boundary is swallowed by the immersed view of boundary (rational intelligence is swallowed by relational intelligence) and this resolves the question of 'false positives' and does away with the associated notion of 'judgement' (a binary, exclusionary reasoning based notion). We no longer 'judge' the difference between two space-time domains in terms of 'worse and better' in high performance mode, since we descend into the boundary, ... 'becoming' the interface and letting our experience and actions rather than our voyeur pronouncements directly cultivate our intended purpose.
When Taiaiake Alfred says that "Bringing a final end to colonialism will demand complete destruction of its intellectual and moral premises.", he is arguably referring to this same sense of inverting the unnatural primacy of 'rational-over-relational' and 'swallowing up' the rational view with the higher dimensional relational view. By becoming the heart and eyes of the interface between our purpose and our englobing environment, we no longer have to generalize as to what falls on which side of the boundaries of our generalizations, ... a discrete (binary) decision which exposes our problem-elimination interventions to the production of 'mixed kill' wherein 'false positives' rise up to incur dysfunction and pathology which leads on to new and more resistant strains of problem which emerge 'nonlocally' (outside of the confines of the perceived problem-space).
Nonlocal pathological behavior induced by such technology-leveraged negative feedback systems as 'EPR' (speed law enforcement by photo-radar) can be described by another more basic 'EPR effect'.
The quantum behavioral 'Einstein-Podalsky-Rosen' effect speaks to the nonlocal behaviors induced by 'quantum entanglement'. In this effect, where two subatomic particles which have been affiliated (have tuned together to the point their spin sum is zero) are subsequently separated and the spin of one is forcibly changed, then the spin of the other, wherever it is located, also changes so as to preserve the zero-sum co-resonance of the two spins.
Seen at the macro level of human behavior, we might say that the imposition of controls can put a 'reverse spin' on the objects of our controls such that they induce anti-regulatory effects non-locally, which play out in other space-time regions; e.g. if we, from a remote voyeur vantage point, impose controls on the generalization based notions of 'Serbs' versus 'Albanians', we may encounter the problem of 'false positives' and induce contrary 'spin' which will play itself out by infusing dissonance non-locally in space and time. If, instead of making remote voyeur 'judgements', we descend 'into the boundary' and act so as to amplify harmony across the interface, as is the mode of operation of exceptional high performance teams, we can avoid the infusing of dysfunction (whether or not we dissolve the problem, we can avoid the infusing of further dysfunction).
Such a descent into the boundary involves a 'polarity flip' which re-instates 'relational intelligence', inclusionary reasoning, trust, open systems responsibility and implicit understanding in the primacy over 'rational intelligence', exclusionary reasoning, suspicion, closed systems responsibility and explicit understanding. This runs counter to the primacy of rational-over-relational in our educational system, and in fact, counter to the primacy of rational-over-relational which dominates organizational thinking and ordering schemas in business and government.
Because of the 'toxic ground' in the western culture, constituted by the primacy of 'rational-over-relational', even exceptional teams which flip polarity are pulled back into the cultural default polarity. Thus, as many have noted, the exceptional team of 'founding fathers' in the US who borrowed natural polarity 'relational-over-rational' concepts from the Iroquois, quickly succumbed to the oldworld primacy, and its 'tyranny of the majority' democracy implementation style.
Since the pathology lies in the particular 'inverted primacy' strain of implementation of democracy; i.e. the 'dominator' or 'colonialist' strain of implementation, and since this has become the 'container' within which we launch new initiatives, we cannot expect initiatives which we intend to BECOME the new container to fluorish in this environment. That is, the soil of 'rational-over-relational' environments are toxic to 'relational-over-rational' cultural seedlings and the new 'relational-over-rational' container will have to be 're-invented' on a networked, rather than local, basis. It seems unlikely that this will be done without the youth of our society becoming networked 'warriors' for evolution, as suggested in a recent essay.
Such warriors, as are implicit in Taiaiake's 'indigenous manifesto', and which need to emerge not only in the indigenous cultures, but in all cultures, will not be in the business of forcing the imposition of new 'ways', but will instead 'become' the interface between the old and the new, the past and the present, ... navigating complexity, not in exclusionary dominator mode, but in an inclusionary co-resonator mode, as alluded to by Henri Laborit in his introduction to 'L'Eloge de la Fuite';
"When our sailboat is no longer able to battle against the wind and sea and stick to the desired heading, there are still two devices to pull us through: The steering ---the jib and the rudder --- is loosed so as to be determined by wind and sea, and the boat takes flight before the storm with rudder now on deck and minimal sail deployed. 'La fuite' ---running before the wind and current --- far from the coast, is often the only way to save the boat and crew, and it opens the way to discovery of unknown shores, shores which will grace the horizon as calm waters are regained. Shores unknown to those considering the obvious cargo and tanker routes, and uncontemplated in the controlled fairway travels of maritime transport companies. You are familiar, no doubt, with a sailboat named 'purpose'. "
Laborit is 'coming from' the inclusionary notion of ecological systems which are constituted by 'spheres englobing spheres', wherein the evolving future emerges as a new, co-centric sphere which englobes pre-existing spheres, ... where the contents of the old world are reborn into a new, inclusionary world wherein the 'explicits' of the old story are swallowed up, becoming an implicit resource for the building of the new story. This 'rebirth' is not a 'voyeur warrior' task which involves action based on rational 'judgement' of a 'better way', ... but instead demands 'immersed warrior' behaviors emanating directly from purpose, ... behaviors which induce co-resonance between inner purpose and outer containing environment, ... the inclusionary and harmony-seeking way of the natural child.
The boundaries of our thought, ... the boundaries of the generalization-based 'thing' and 'fact' components of our mental models, ... are, in reality, far from discrete and explicit. There is thus no way to 'construct' an unapproximated view of reality in 'voyeur mode', ... by building upon and upwards from these explicit constructs. Instead, the boundaries are fractal and have a depth of detail which never 'bottoms out'. This is why it is necessary to become 'warriors for evolution', ... to mentally descend into the boundary, allowing our heart, our senses and our physical being to harmoniously conjoin inner purpose with outer experience, ... becoming the instruments of our own purpose.
* * *
Return to '98/'99 Update Page and Index of Essays