The Defining Issue: Humility Rules!

Montreal, April 17, 1999

http://rampages.onramp.net/~emlumley/humility.htm

The fire in Jean Morel's eye brought screaming visions of wild indians onto Emile's mindscreen, ... Jean's eyelids seemed like window blinds opening up on primeval bonfires, ritual beacons orchestrating the cultivation of violence. Their eyes had met seconds after Emile entered the bar, and something in Jean's glance had quietly but aggressively ordered Emile to come over to his table as soon as he had his drink. Emile knew that Jean wanted to discuss 'Commemorating Autistic Terrorism', his last essay, and, armed with a large beer, Emile walked over to find out that Jean was with guests, an old and close friend and his daughter. Jean made the introductions and then took Emile aside to talk. That was at 9:00 p.m., ... by 1:00 a.m. the guests, who had seen almost nothing of Jean, said their goodbyes and departed, obviously accustomed to Jean's eccentricities, ... at 3:25 a.m., Germaine came by for the third time, urging us to drink up and leave. The flow of the evening had initially resonated to the drumbeats of war, ... but one could feel the gentle promise of peace once again.

Jean: Emile, let's sit over here for a moment. .... .. I've read this essay through twice and I'm damn angry, ... this is Utopian!

Emile: No it's not.

Zeus: Emile, ... he's caught in a bind somehow and looking for a way out.

Emile to Zeus: I know, ... its clear he shares the 'autistic collective' model on a reasoned basis, it was 'built in' to his grandmother's philosophy, but now he's between a rock and a hard place, ... he clearly has strong judgemental views on Kosovo, and now he's either got to relinquish the 'righteousness' of his judgement or abandon the autism model, ... one of the two, ...

Emile: Jean, the essay is not about 'turn the other cheek' philosophy, ... it is not about what Missy and Larry refer to as 'the father of the prodigal son' model, ... it says clearly in the essay that pragmatic action must be taken, ... but that action is to be taken, not in the sense of the 'Chieftain model' of judgement and 'command and control' follow-through, but in the sense of amplifying harmony or attenuating dissonance.

Jean: ... yes, I know, I know, ...

Emile: The difference is, that in the autistic model, the protective intervention does not come from a sense of judgement of 'right' or 'wrong', a binary-absolutist perspective which puts a very different spin on follow-through actions.

Jean: I read it over twice, and it made me damn angry.

Emile: What you've shared with me in our past discussions is woven in there, Jean.

Jean: ... I know, I know, (flipping the pages), ... this is all me.

Emile: In debating the rights and wrongs of the NATO action on Kosovo, ... as we've been doing heatedly for some hours, with the participation of your friend, Aart, ... all of the discussion has concerned a small sphere of space-time, ... while the interpretations made by the opposing sides draw from a far larger space-time sphere which contains the little one we're focusing on, ... like the great barrier reef ecology contains a branch of coral; ... understanding the coral branch ecology draws on an understanding of the barrier reef ecology, the containing space-time sphere. And we both know that in the case of Kosovo, the experiences drawn from the larger containing sphere, which could be as different as night and day, are being applied to the interpretation of the situation within the small space-time sphere representing the recent unhappy events in Kosovo.

Jean: As I've shared with you before, ... the space-time model of which you speak is something I've used all my life, ... taught to me by one of my white uncles, ... imagining the problem to be in the smaller inner sphere and myself on the surface skin of a larger outer sphere which contains the problem sphere. Instead of looking in at the problem, I look outward and I crab-crawl around on the skin of the large sphere until I get to a spot which 'feels right', ... then I turn over and take another look at the problem. I may, in fact, repeat this process numerous times until my view and attitude settle into a state which feels appropriately harmonic to me.

Emile: Such avoidance of 'first impression' judgement, seems to me to support the non-dysfunctional navigating of complex situations, and to equate to a questioning of everyone's subjectivity as occurs in the autistic model. In the autistic teacher model, the teacher always intervenes, but does not intervene by judging differentially against either of the two opposing sides, ... nor does the model assume that the teacher has the capacity to make such judgements. In the case of Kosovo, it seems clear that NATO is coming in with the 'fist of righteousness', and that Serb lives are valued less than Albanian-ethnic lives in this action. Not only that, but the stated plans for the 'take over' of the Kosovo territory by a party 'of the third part' and forcibly 'returning it to normal' and 'making it safe' for Albanian ethnics to return and live there, confirms the judgemental nature of the intervention. The forced, third-party occupation of the territory also nullifies instead of cultivates any opportunity for self-educating evolution of the opposing parties as characterizes the autistic model.

Zeus: Yes, the operative phrase is 'returning it to normal', ... whose normal? ... how can any past state be termed 'normal' when the world is evolving irreversibly? In lieu of an agreement on what constitutes 'normality', there is still the option via the autistic teacher model, for taking forceful action to preserve the health of all involved which by implication opens the situation up for self-education, whether or not such opportunity will be taken up. As imperfect and difficult as that autistic intervention approach might be, ... the only alternative is to make a judgement on which side to support, and the logical flaws or 'incompleteness' in that approach are well known. As was said a few moments ago, Jean knows that if we had a Serb and an Albano-Kosovar sitting here now, each would 'believe in' the infallibility of their subjective perspectives, ... just as we all tend to do.

Emile: It seems that we can agree on a rational level that our subjectivity is relative rather than absolute, but on an emotional level, our western acculturation to the absolutist paradigms of Parmenides, Aristotle and Euclidian space encourages us to make absolute judgements upon which we can take emotionally fuelled action.

Jean: I can see what you are saying, ... but the essay lacks something, ... you should say something at the very end, after the epilogue, .... . You should say something like, .... 'But I don't know.', ... and if you want to avoid that degree of humility and retain some pride, ... you can add the word 'yet' to that qualification.

Emile: I know you are right that 'something' else must be said. In trying to expose the fallacy of absolute judgement, it seems as if I am myself judging the West.

Jean: I'm still thinking about this, ... we'll talk some more next time round, ... we'll see you then, ... all the best.

Emile: Zeus, the tranquillity and friendliness of our adieus belies the six hours of heated debate which have transpired this evening, ... we seem to be caught in one of those paradoxes as in Goedel's theorem. What we are struggling with is that what I seem to be saying in that essay is, ... 'in my judgement, the west is absolutely wrong to judge others to be absolutely wrong'. This of course means that one has run into 'the incompleteness of finite systems of logic', ... that is why the autistic collective model has such appeal, ... it carries us beyond the capability of standard logic, ... which is, when you think about it, no surprise, ... if one cannot build on the absolute concepts of 'true' and 'false', which is the essence of logic, ... we are in a situation where we have overrun the limits of logic and must suspend closure as we navigate our way forward through a complex situation.

Zeus: Of course, Aristotelian logic isn't the only reasoning tool, and it's clear that the autistic teacher can make a non-judgemental intervention on the basis of suppressing dissonance and averting harm to all parties involved, ... but we are so used to making those judgements one way or the other, .... we seem to crave the binary clarity which then lets us unleash our full repressed furies on the evil offenders, and this synthetic judgemental clarity then, justifies or rationalizes perpetrating inhumanities which we could not otherwise allow ourselves to do.

Emile: Yes, and it all comes right back to this issue of sovereignty, which is itself an absolutist notion. In the case of autistic children fighting over who's pencil or eraser it is, ... the concept of sharing is available and there is no need for an absolute decision such as 'who has sovereignty over this property'. It's interesting that while the redman used to think in terms of sharing land, ... rivers and lakes, ... hunting grounds, sacred mountains etc., ... such a game cannot be played where the other party insists on playing the absolute ownership game. For those who view man as part of nature, .. the notion of selling land makes no sense at all, .... it is like selling the air we breathe. The redman's idea of stewarding land for our and all of nature's descendants would seem to make a great deal of sense, and opens up the notion of sharing beyond the anthropocentrism of the west, where all is seen to exist for the purpose of being divvyed up amongst men, ... and instead viewing sharing in the context of giving a voice to birds, animals, plants and even waterways as well, as the dispositon of things.

Zeus: As I reflect on it, I think Jean hit the nail on the head when he brought up the issue of humility. The self-righteous anger we open ourselves up to in the wake of judgement is a pride-related thing, ... we have pride in our ability to discern absolute truths, pride in remaining 'loyal to our word' and the word of our culture and ethnicity, and it is our pride that has us insist that our subjectivity cannot err.

Emile: I agree, ... there was no problem in a reasoned acceptace of the autistic collective model, ... but that was still a voyeur kind of acceptance, the accepting of a 'dry theory' sitting out there on its own, ... and what we went into with the Kosovo discussion was an immerged view, .... it was no long hypothetical and 'out there', ... we felt it in our gut and we 'were coming' from our gut, and we in no way wanted to relinquish the anger we felt in our judgement of the Serbs, ... and, of course, from the Serbian perspective, based on their interpretation of the historical evolution of things, they just as surely do not want to relinquish the anger they feel in their judgement of Albanian ethnics and the West. Everyone selects their own interpretational rationales from the historical flow of events, from the big containing space-time sphere, based on their own experience.

Zeus: Exactly, ... while Jean did not want to relinquish his own emotion-based judgemental subjectivity, ... he also could find no 'reason' why he should abandon the autistic collective model he had already accepted. And your suggestion that one could shuffle the same deck and come up with a judgement against the West as well as a judgement against the Serbs did not sit well with him, he was caught in no-man's land.

Emile: Yes, I understand his discomfort and I shall add a comment to the end of my 'commemorating autistic terrorism' essay as he suggested. My gut feel has been that we should probe more deeply into the geometry of this paradox, and a thought experiment which might shed some light has come to mind which I should like your help on, Zeus.

Zeus: I am yours for it.

Emile: What we bumping up against in our (saying that (saying something is wrong) is wrong), is the paradox which arises from the fact that (saying something is wrong) = (something). To get beyond this limiting boundary of paradox, where exclusionary logic ends and inclusionary logic, 'la logique floue', must take over, ... where a 'particle behavior' view ends and a 'wave interference' view begins, ... and where absolutism ends and relativity begins, we must understand the geometries of relativity better than we now do, and we must understand how one 'bootstraps' meaning from relativistic situations since there are no fixed foundations to build one's reasoning structures upon. As you recall, bootstrapping, is the bringing into connection in one's mind, a multitude of relevant real and imaginary experiences, wherein the 'ordering principle' which puts all of our experiences in meaningful context and confluence, ... IS the tacit understanding which we are seeking. In order to explore these geometries, we can create one of these real-and-imaginary experiences via a thought experiment, .... an approach taken by Einstein in developing relativity theory.

Imagine yourself, Zeus on a red spacecraft which has for some time been out in open space out of sight of anything but distant stars, ... and suddenly your redship's interception sensors all go on alert and on your environmental scan screen, you see two blips appear, signifying objects close to the size of your ship, approaching from behind at an exceptional litratio, i.e. 0.35 which is roughly 3,600,000,000. kilometers per hour. They are upon you and pass you in no time, before you can even adjust your thrusters, with the one on your starboard side almost colliding with you, ... all you have detected is that they are green and black in colour. Before you can collect your wits, ... the sensor alerts are at it again, and this time you are overflown by three of them and underflown by two. What would you make of this Zeus?

Zeus: Well bringing these all sparse facts plus some imagination into connection, ... we can see that since this act was repeated by the same type of craft, that their action was coherent and coordinated (that it was not just one stray craft) and since they flew by so close to you, ... they are either very curious, or giving you a warning to stay away from this region, or they are hostile and experimentally examining you before setting you up for a hit. In any case, ... it is clearly an unfriendly action to scare others in this way, .. with the high speed fly-bys and the near collision tactic, and since they outspaced you as they did, .... they must have far more powerful technology than you do, and can continue to play cat-and-mouse with you, if they choose. If survival is important to you, the occupants of the redship, I would suggest that the appropriate action is to warn off the marauders by vaporizing one of their crafts if they threaten attack once more.

Emile: Good thought experimenting Zeus, ... now we're going to hear from the 'Green-and-Blacks', ... just you and I at this point, and not the occupants of the red spaceship. In a tracking station on the rim of the asteroidal constellation Glybnorr, ... the environmental sentry is noting that; ..... "a red spaceship has penetrated the third ring of our constellation at a litratio of .35, narrowly missing the Artegra ecological pod. It has continued on, terrorizing the residents of the Zynorg cluster, ... and is headed for our high density clustering at a continued excessive and accelerating litratio. The redship marauder clearly has more powerful thrusters than our interceptors, and this, combined with the fact that they have now lifted their laser silo-covers, indicating preparedness for a vaporizer attack, has made it necessary to move to interception procedure six, and we are warbling our magnetic resonators in readiness for nuclear coagulation action.

Zeus: Cosmocenter, ... we have a problem.

Emile: 'This is Cosmocenter to Redship and Glybnorr, ... we are a beacon network coincident with the 0.5 isograviton enveloping the black hole Orpheus, BHO13. Our coverage sphere includes both of your space-time regions. Our tracking observations indicate that Redship crossed into the 3.0 isograviton of Orpheus without deploying its gravity deflectors, and is being pulled backwards into the Orpheus folds, ... accelerating over the past year to a litratio of .35 relative to Orpheus and Glybnorr and is right now being pulled at excessive speed through the inhabited clusters of Glybnorr. We suggest that if Redship is not carrying gravity deflection technology, ... that Glybnorr move immediately to provide assistance to Redship.

Zeus: Yes, its the old 'eye-ball to eye-ball' mesmerization thing, ... neither of the opposing parties can see the bigger picture which contains the both of them. In fact they resist all distractions as the mutually opposing emotions build, ... they do not want to hear stories, ... they are intent on following through on their own subjective impressions which they believe to be absolute and beyond question. Even though reason would have it that that subjectivity must be relative and not absolute, .. that multiple interpretations of the same dataset are always possible, due both the optional radius of space-time region we include, and the different experience we bring to the interpretation of the space-time region contents. In the end, everything is relative.

Emile: Yes, and there are at least two significant geometrical points which fall out of our thought experiment; ... one is, of course, that when we are looking eyeball to eyeball in voyeur mode, as Glybnorr and the Redship were doing, ... there's no absolute way to establish who is moving in on who, and this relativity principle holds for all space-time situations. If a Mohawk from the north side of lake Ontario lands his canoe on the south shore, and a white man accuses him of encroaching, ... the redman may well accuse the white man of encroachment and in fact, that is rather likely, not that the white man's justice system will pay any heed. In the domain of relative movement, all is relative, nothing absolute, and what is administrated as absolute is simply cultural convention, ... but whose is it to be?, ... that is the question.

The second geometric point is much more subtle and therefore more insidious in the spawning of autistic terrorism, .... in curved, relativistic space-time, one can either use oneself as a 'euclidian' reference center, ... or one can think in terms of being immersed in a shared flow-space which has no center, as characterizes the non-euclidian, relativistic space-time reality which modern physics says we are immersed in, .... and so there are important cultural defaults in operation here. As was made clear by the Cosmocenter, whose view included and encompassed the views of the occupants of both the redship and Glybnorr, the latter combattants could have 'become larger than their judgements' and developed a view within which they could see themselves, rather than staying on the flatspace plane, each looking out from his unquestioned subjectivity, and proceeding to butt each others heads.

Zeus: Quite right Emile, ... don't let's not continue to belabor it so. We are simply saying that the definition of 'pride' is seeing yourself at the center of the universe and seeing your subjectivity as infallible as you look out at the world, right? And thus, humility is the space-time reciprocal of pride, where you see yourself as part of a shared, evolutionary space-time flow and that equates to letting your subjectivity float relativistically. Seen in this context, Jean was having the problem that we all have in the western culture, of letting go of his unquestioned subjectivity, aka 'anthropocentrism', and it is from that centristic subjectivity, aka 'voyeurism', that we become the 'parasite of the visible', .... and feel empowered to 'know good' and 'know bad' when we see it, even though our reason would have us concede that there are bound to be multiple interpretations of the same view, depending on our experience and the radius of our space-time sampling sphere, ... which in turn means that there are bound to be conflicting views of 'good' and 'bad', and that it's natural for us to end up with proverbs such as, .. 'evil is in the eye of the beholder' etc. etc.

Emile: My, aren't we in a hurry today. Ok, but let me be the devil's advocate here, ... if its as simple as all that, why doesn't everybody see it, and why don't we all pick up on a SEAC type of model, the self-educating autistic collective, and be done with all this absolutist, non-relativistic subjective dysfunction?

Zeus: In the western culture, ... humility is seen in terms of subservience and people are encouraged to be proud and to be their own centers, ... to be individuals, detached from nature and detached from one other, .. chasing the 'American dream' and acculturated addiction to living someone else's life, some iconic life which has been 'promoted' by the culture .... heaven forbid taking the risk and opening oneself up to one's own natural ontogeny, ... what if a toad rather than a prince were to emerge?, ... our culture values exteriors far more than interiors. By contrast, the aboriginal possessed a different type of humility through the belief that he was an immersed constituent-participant in nature, ... part of the whole, ... even rocks and soil were his brothers. You remember when sitting on a log in English Bay last year, talking to Kahgoosahgowpoomoosay, the helper to the Ojibway Elder, ... she told us that that the teachings/learnings of the Ojibway were fourfold, ... honesty, kindness, sharing and strength, ... and you asked her, ... what about humility?, ... and she said that humility as an essential internal feeling was implicit in the basic beliefs and teachings/learnings, which were not really describable in english words, even though we needed them as rough tools for sharing.

Emile: Yes, that's true, ... I had almost forgotten. What she was saying, I believe, was that the notion of space-time sharing, ... of being part of nature, rather than seeing yourself as the center and master of it, is a far more basic thing than can be described by words like 'humility'. Being in immersed space-time mode involves tacit understanding. When we talk about 'humility', it connotes a much more linear thing, as the dictionary references make clear. Websters describes 'humility' as follows;

Main Entry: hu

Function: noun Date: 14th century

: the quality or state of being humble

Main Entry: 1hum

Function: adjective

Inflected Form(s): hum /-b(&-)l&r/; hum /-b(&-)l&st/

Etymology: Middle English, from Old French, from Latin humilis low, humble, from humus earth; akin to Greek chthOn earth, chamai on the ground

Date: 13th century

1 : not proud or haughty : not arrogant or assertive

2 : reflecting, expressing, or offered in a spirit of deference or submission <a humble apology>

3 a : ranking low in a hierarchy or scale : INSIGNIFICANT, UNPRETENTIOUS b : not costly or luxurious

<a humble contraption>

Zeus: Is it any wonder no-one wants to be humble, to be submissive and no more than the opposite or null-side of proud, .. to say that this doesn't get at the type of humility associated with getting into shared space mode would be gross understatement, ...our linear language can't deal with high dimensional tacit concepts like the difference between 'mogular' voyeur space and 'inter-mogular' immersed space-time. All we ever go on about is where things sit along a line, ... better than, ... worse than, ... higher or more haughty than, ... lower or more submissive than, .... There is no VOLUME in these ways of thinking, ... no notion of spherical space,... We would do far better to say such things as, ...'honey, you make the radius of my joysphere balloon to the bursting point',... or, 'chief seattle not only did not center his reality from himself, he saw centers of reality in all things, animal, vegetable and mineral', ... that is, his tacit understanding of man-in-nature was a lived humility. What's with this linear stuff anyhow, .... where a whole culture can deny the spherical voumetry of evolutionary space-time and speak of 'progress', the march along a line from worse to better, ... from crystal sets to colour television, ... the notion of crystalline purification, a linear-structural thing, rather than the notion of co-inclusionary wholeness enriching, a volumetic-harmonic thing.

Emile: Yes, I can hear those words of A. Square ringing in my ears right now, ... the ones he spoke to that elusively tacitous paragon of three-dimensional perfection, Lord Sphere, in Edwin Abbot's 1880's classic 'Flatland';

"My Lord, your own wisdom has taught me to aspire to One even more great, more beautiful, and more closely approximate to Perfection than yourself. As you yourself, superior to all Flatland forms, combine many circles in One, so doubtless there is One above you who combines many Spheres in One Supreme Existence, surpassing even the Solids of Spaceland."

Zeus: Yes, Abbott's mathematical studies at Cambridge exposed him to the non-Euclidian space concepts of Riemann, published in 1868, and against this richer space-time backdrop, he was able to see how the figures of Euclid come alive in the psychology of our society and how they are propagated over time by our language, and programmed into the thinking of successive generations through our educational system. The multi-centred space in A Square's remarks to Lord Sphere foreshadows the infinite dimensional space by which complexity mathematicians such as David Ruelle characterize the phase space of turbulent flow in nature, ... as they do the shared space of man-in-nature seen and lived by Chief Sealth or 'Seattle'.

Emile: As the aboriginals understood, millenia before our modern physicists, in nature we have opposition which is dipolar, co-resonant, co-evolutional, mutually defining and not simply linearly antithetical or complementary as in Euclidian flatspace, ... everything is both good and bad at the same time and I would go so far as to say that aboriginal traditionalists are proud of their humility, and if you insult their forest, they will feel insulted too, and are hardly likely to be 'humble' in the sense of 'submissive' about such issues. Their humility is a lived humility, it is about sharing in a very personal and non-anthropocentric way, ... that's why we rarely see the traditionalist elders, ... they're not on television, 'selling' their humility like a western religious evangelist.

The humility issue comes back again to the fact that our language is next to a curse when it comes to sharing an understanding of such things as 'community as complex system'. ... In any case, Zeus, let's take stock, .... while we've covered some good ground, there's more than a few loose ends here. We can say that the redship captain didn't see himself as being immersed in a shared space-time flow; ... his default vantage point was a Euclidian flatspace default by which he saw himself as the center of 'thing-space', .... and thus he quite naturally came up with a conspiracy theory for two innocent astropods which HE almost wiped out as he slipped by them at 350 milli-litratios. We could go on and talk about causality versus attraction and repulsion here, as Nietzsche did, but lets move on. We can leave it at the fact that the redship captain thought in terms of 'thing-behaviors' rather than flow-interference, which made him ask 'who caused me this scare, .... who almost caused that mid-space collision'. For him, everything was happening due to causal agencies which, of course, leaves a big old hole in understanding systems behaviors by leaving out effects which arise from coherent non-actions, natural or man-modulated.

Zeus: Yes, as soon as one replaces the principle of sharing with the principle of sovereignty, everyone is licenced to monopolize resources and to withhold them from others with impunity, as is the common practice in the west.

Emile: Using sovereignty to cultivate the ontogeny of oneself and one's fellows is one thing, but to attach anti-ontogenetic compliance conditions of access to one's sovereign possessions, is insidious and dysfunction engendering, as is commonly done to youth and aboriginals in the western system, and as Aart was saying during our Kosovo discussion, the political correctness squeeze hangs over the teacher's head more heavily all the time. We are using our one-sided causal system of justice in this purification program, ... to remove teachers who might traumatize our children by uttering such obscenities as 'ass', ... or to banish a six year old boy for kissing a six year old girl. According to Aart, the employment situation for teachers is already so difficult that one is hard pressed to remain on full employment, and there is a decided correlation between those who remain employed and their submissiveness to this ethnic purification program in the schools. Aart himself barters the retention of his common sense and sanity by working for two different school districts on a partial employment basis which adds up to 100% employment.

Zeus: In reconciling this western ethnic purification with 'community as a complex system', we mustn't forget Jules Henry's point that 'manipulative withholding' is the basis of much dishonesty in western male-female relationships, with females sometimes trading their favors, not for such things as an end to war as in Lysistrata, but for more personal and material objectives which are clearly anti-ontogenetic on both sides of the relationship.

Emile: And of course, if and when the male begins to suspect that the witholding is not deriving from an authentic and honest allocation schema but is emanating from a strategy of manipulation, reaction or over-reaction can brew up with abuse and violence being the result.

Zeus: ... do you see what I see?

Emile: ... yes I do, ... a common geometry which seems to operate fractally at multi-levels, ... the haves extorting cultural compliance from the have-nots, ... with the result that the have-nots react or over-react violently,... violence being the only weapon for the have-nots, which leads to embitterment and to the further intensification of extortionate withholding, a vicious circle indeed.

Zeus: Now in an honest system, it can become clear whether the withholding stems from well-meaning husbandry of resources and the cultivation of ontogenetic health of individual and community, ... but in a dishonest system, there is no telling and suspicion may breed all manner of social dysfunction. For example, by this geometry, the Western powers can be viewed as being in abusive feminine withholding mode, reacting to the rape of Kuwait and Kosovo which they helped to induce.

Emile: This is where we started off in trying to deal with Jean's comment, Zeus, .. as Wittgenstein complained about language, it is single issue at a time, and you cannot go directly to the synoptic view, without first going to jail, so to speak. If one first utters the phrase 'manipulative withholding by the haves', ... one is cheered by one faction and jeered by another, and if one then utters the phrase 'rape of the withholder or her friends by the have-nots', the cheering and jeering sections invert, ... all this occurs and the sustained listening is lost, before the point can ever be made about the vicious circle of the two effects together, fuelled by dishonesty and suspicion.

Emile: We have gone on long enough here. I felt it right to add a follow-on statement to the 'Commemorating Autistic Terrorism' essay, as Jean suggested, and I am going to link this commentary-essay to that essay along with a short note. My basic take is that Jean's internal conflict was arising from his feeling that giving up his support for NATO would open the door, not to a non-judgemental balance, but to the pendulum overbalancing in the opposite direction, ... to be the first to be honest is difficult. As the behavioralist Chris Argyris implies and as the anthropologist Jules Henry says, "Were honesty --- the representation of things as they are rather than as we want people to believe them to be --- to become a habit, it would threaten the very foundations of Western civilization."

Zeus: A threat that more and more people are hoping will soon come to realization, ... so that we can subsume our Parmenidian-Aristotelian-Euclidian foundations by the sky-hooks of relativistic purpose. Emile, .... I, too, am glad that we are adding this explanatory note. Even though the proposed SEAC model is inherently non-judgemental, ... the supportive discussion must pass through an exposed serial gauntlet of linguistic explanation, ... demonstrating how multiple factions coming from unquestioning subjectivity are bound to put themselves into irresolvable conflict, ... to the Goedel's theorem limit of absolutist exclusionary logic based reasoning. If one does not embrace inclusionary logic where things can be good and bad at the same time, ... and instead persists in generalizing things as EITHER being good OR bad, ... things get impossibly complex. But since language does not allow us to address two issues simultaneously, ... an atmosphere of trust must be cultivated wherein all parties can sit still through the serial utterance of views, .... i.e. we must first utter one view; e.g. that 'the Western powers are extorting anti-ontogenetic compliance from the have-nots' which guts their self-esteem and would force them to betray their own natural development, and then the other; that 'Rogue nations outside of the western alliance are raping and abusing the friends of the west'. If that trust and patience is lacking, when one addresses these statements one at a time, the tendency will be to focus solely on the offending statement rather than looking at the two of them as a dysfunctional couplet which must be addressed as a unity.

Emile: While that is an unfortunate exposure, the more unfortunate omission would be to fail to draw attention to the fact that abuse by coherent and manipulative non-action, a psychological form of ethnic cleansing, tends to be perpetrated with impunity in the world today, ... a world which is in the process of being 'ethnically cleansed' in the image of the western culture.

Zeus: I am in full agreement Emile, ... my only hope is that such a statement is seen, not as a causal attack, by marauders, ... but as a containing-sphere-view of how different peoples can be inadvertently pulled into an antagonistic confluence which need not be interpreted in terms of 'good guys' and 'bad guys', but seen instead as a motivator for becoming larger than our judgements and finding a new and unifying story to be reborn into.

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