how language is shaping social dynamics is important inquiry
your inquiry into the influence of language and definitions on public policy has the potential to deliver valuable insights. philosophical writings like those of Nietzsche in 'Twilight of the Idols' and related works can be very informing; e.g. on the issue of defining terrorism, as you have already pointed out;
"“an action in itself is quite devoid of value ; the whole question is this: who performed it? One and the same ” crime ” may, in one case, be the greatest privilege, in the other infamy. As a matter of fact, it is the selfishness of the judges which interprets an action (in regard to its author) according as to whether it was useful or harmful to themselves (or in relation to its degree of likeness or unlikeness to them).”— Nietzsche on ‘Morality’ and ‘Herd Behaviour’ in ‘The Will to Power’.
nietzsche's further analysis shows how this herd behaviour that comes from accepting the authority's definition of 'terrorism', runs deeper than this; i.e. the herd (the general public in an authoritarian system) is controlled by discursive reason built into the political rhetoric of the authorities (politicians).
many people 'buy in' to solid reasoning and the moral judgement that follows on from it, as with the forensic science that proves that a person 'did it' and 'is guilty of an offense' and the reasoning goes on to say that 'the guilty offender should be punished', implying that society that is doing the judging is the 'innocent victim' of the harm caused by the guilty offender. all of this is, everyday, swallowed and digested by the herd; i.e. by the good and moral citizens of democratic states.
if one studies the differences between native languages and english or the 'SAE' (standard average European) noun-and-verb languages, one discovers how we [the herd] can be fooled by the SAE belief in 'reason' and 'morality'. if we were putting intuition and restoring balance and harmony into their natural precedence over reason and morality, our society would be transforming, relationally, rather than standing its ground (maintaining its righteousness, goodness and innocence) under the press of change-agents/dissidents, rather than condemning them and incarcerating them and, in effect, 'scape-goating them' for the dissonance arising between citizens and citizens..
there are two important concepts that are used to construct a 'semantic reality'; ... a 'reality' agreed through reasoned discourse, that does not reconcile with the physical reality of our experience and that achieves this 'scape-goating'. these 'two important concepts are 'categories' and 'events'.
categories impute 'being' to 'activities'. for example, a terrorist is defined on the basis of 'terrorist activity'. so the author of a terrorist act is a 'terrorist human being'. but language goes even further; i.e. a group can be defined as a 'terrorist group' on the basis of a terrorist act that one or more members of the group were involved in. now, although the definition of 'terrorist' started from an activity, it now defines a category, terrorist, in terms of being a member of a terrorist group. this is sufficient for getting a surprise visit from a drone. its the same technique used by Al Qaida and ISIS, called 'takfiri' where you define a category whose members are evil and who deserve to be neutralized. the category of rebel or dissident was no good because it has a romantic and inspiring sense to it. the category of criminal or terrorist removes the notion that one is pushing back from being 'provoked' by the establishment and implies that the authorship of the violent action is jumpstart authored by the individual, a member of a category which is NOT the same category as that which good, innocent people, victims of unprovoked harmful action are included in.
[cultures that don't have categories in their language architecture do not have the categories offender and victim and do not set up their justice process as a win/lose exercise between 'state' (victim) VERSUS 'accused' (offender), but continue to include all parties as members of one and the same community, and the justice exercise is to restore balance and harmony in the relational social dynamic of community. aka 'restorative justice']
ok, in addition to categories being a bogus 'hidden convention' included in 'reasoned rhetoric' that the public buys into, there is the concept of an 'event'. there is no such thing in the physical reality of our natural experience as an 'event'. the event is a concept used in constructing a 'semantic reality' that is the 'operative reality' of Western authoritarian communities. the 'event' is local in space and time, meaning that it has a beginning and ending and transpires in a particular place. Western justice and law enforcement orients to 'events' such as 'criminal acts' and 'terrorist acts'. If the authoritarian regime is oppressive to minorities within it, those experiencing the oppression from the authoritarian regime/society, or who have friends and/or family who are, may endure it without 'push back' against the establishment. the pushing back may lead to an intensifying of the oppression which may lead to an intensifying of the pushing back which may lead to an intensifying of the oppression, which may, ... yada, yada, yada.
this pattern says that there is a physical phenomenon here that must be understood in terms of its progressive development, but the justice system investigates 'events' , so even if the terrorist events rise from 25 to 50 to 200 as the oppressive regime intensifies its oppression in response to pushback, the Western system of justice AND forensic science is based on the scientific notion of an 'event'. this is what differential calculus also uses to eliminate 'bias' as in steady pressure/oppression. here's how;
“Origin of Mathematical Physics. Let us go further and study more closely the conditions which have assisted the development of mathematical physics. We recognise at the outset the efforts of men of science have always tended to resolve the complex phenomenon given directly by experiment into a very large number of elementary phenomena, and that in three different ways.
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First, with respect to time. Instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past. Thanks to this postulate, instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing down its differential equation; for the laws of Kepler we substitute the law of Newton.
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Next, we try to decompose the phenomena in space. What experiment gives us is a confused aggregate of facts spread over a scene of considerable extent. We must try to deduce the elementary phenomenon, which will still be localised in a very small region of space. — Henri Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis’, Chapter IX, Hypotheses in Physics”
scientific reasoning [e.g. CSI] is very important to authoritarian regimes to focus attention on the 'author of disturbing events'. it promotes blindness to a regime's ongoing historical oppressive treatment of minorities, by using this concept of an 'event', as if it were physically real [IT IS NOT], together with the concept of 'category' as if it were physically real [IT IS NOT]. so, science will assume that the causal authorship of a violent event is local-in-space-and-time. of course oppressive regimes are oppressive in a manner that is dispersed over space and time kind of like applying the heat so that at some point people are popping off like popping corns. The 'event' is the local-in-space-and-time 'popping off' so it must be true that the individual 'corn' is responsible and no-one else.
both of these idealized [not-real] concepts of 'categories of being' and 'events in local space and time] arise in the constructing of a 'semantic reality' which authoritarian regimes employ as 'the operative reality' [which is NOT the physical reality of our actual experience; i.e. our experience intuition understands how physical phenomena have a progressive development that is not captured in 'events'].
the 'category' is a concept used to separate out a community member who is in a push-pull relation within his community so as to be able to analyze his actions in a non-relational manner; i.e. as actions that are fully and solely coming from him in his guise as a member of a 'category' rather than as a member of the community.
the 'event' is a concept that isolates actions to a small local-in-space-and-time window, which eliminates from consideration or view, a long-standing condition of oppression [relational tensions imposed by the regime which humiliate and disempower/suffocate minorities]. the 'event'. of course the physical reality of our actual, natural experience includes the long period of humiliating oppression, but Western 'semantic reality' puts 'events' before the continuous development of physical phenomena;
"Instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past. "
so, your intuition to investigate 'language and context' is a good one. there are insights to be gained through such investigation which shed light on how authoritarian regimes use 'reason' and 'science' and 'moral judgement' to construct a 'semantic reality' wherein the authorship of 'the event' is seen as one-sided or 'zero baseline' as in differential calculus rather than 'relative' [rebel-regime coincidence of opposites]. That is, a regulatory system that searches for 'disturbing events' can't tell the difference between a truly zero baseline or a steady negative bias. this goes back to the fact that 'events' do not exist in the physical reality of our actual, natural experiencing of a transforming relational continuum. an event is a structure in 'semantic reality'.
you are right to question how language is being used to bamboozle the masses and scapegoat the dissidents; ... dissidents that we need to help bring about needed societal transformation.
in a world that is 'given only once', ... as a transforming relational continuum, there is no such thing as 'Creation' and 'Extinction'. they are binary idealizations.
'field' is in a natural precedence over 'matter'. relations are in a natural precedence over 'things'. as a microbiome, humans are a relational melange of many participants and this relational melange is continually transforming.
The concept of 'extinction' rests dependently on the concept of 'existence' or 'being'. there is no 'being' in the physical reality of our actual experience. 'Being' is a condition that we associate with local, visible, material forms (relational features in the transforming relational continuum).
the 'form' in our field of vision exists but that establishes only 'appearances' and not 'being'.
Nature will continue on as a transforming relational continuum, without the need to subjectively isolate and label relational features within the transforming relational continuum.
'Extinctions' make no sense to Nature, the relationally transforming 'all', neither does 'Creation'. 'Creation is an abstract concept. If a submarine volcano rises above the surface of the ocean we call it an 'island' and we speak of the 'creation' of a new island as in the case of 'Surtsey'. There is no 'new thing' that has been created; i.e. the volcano [a feature in the transforming relational continuum] had been building steadily but we had not observed it because it was below the surface of the ocean. The moment that we speak of as its birth or creation is the moment we 'saw it' and acknowledged it; i.e. 'Creation' is 'subjective' and not 'objective'. Likewise 'extinction'. If we have identified and name-labeled a form and then later can no longer observe it anywhere, we say it is extinct.
first it existed [we saw it and verified its existence] and later it 'no longer exists'. This is playing with language and grammar.
granted, there were forms in the Jurassic that were no longer seen (in the geological record) in the Cretaceous. this must be due to relational transformation.
Nature is not being 'depleted' by 'extinctions' as if it were a repository of many distinct and exotic forms [that exist as things-in-themselves]. nature is undergoing continual relational transformation and human observers who wish to update their descriptions must keep dividing the 'One' into parts in a different way, depending on what is currently 'showing up'. as for the status of a particular form/species in the transforming relational continuum, "one cannot step into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and it is not the same person stepping into it"-- Heraclitus
i.e. there are no 'fixed identity beings' in a transforming relational continuum;
"And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income …” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1067
extinction is binary idealization: ... like "creation", ... it is not 'real'.
the zapatistas have it and most of us don't; i.e. a relationship that binds together one another and the land where 'intellectual connecting' and 'physical connecting' happen together.
indigenous anarchism was disrupted by colonial authoritarianism which orients to controlling space and controlling the future state of that space. today's anarchists finding themselves inside that space that the authoritarians aim to maintain control of, and are thus prevented from operating in anarchist ways; e.g. they can't do it while under the yoke of regulatory and enforcing agencies where resistance turns one into an 'outlaw'.
so, a lot of anarchist discussion shifts AWAY FROM ANARCHISM to the struggle with the controlling self-anointed 'authorities'. such discussion did not even exist prior to the arrival of the authoritarians, yet 'anarchism' flourished, so if anarchists were talking about anarchism prior to arrival of the authoritarians, there was nothing 'self-conscious' and 'paranoid' about it. the self-consciousness (seeing oneself via a self-other split as one of two competing anthropocentric movements) is an artefact of trying to break out of the controlling, suffocating tentacles of authoritarianism so as to live naturally; i.e. anarchistically.
the pitfall here is to let the struggle with authoritarians turn us into authoritarians; i.e. so that we then begin to rally forces under the banner of 'control over the future' by 'banding together' in pursuit of a common purpose; e.g. the standard western authoritarian aim; 'to dominate and control nature' [Hobbes, Locke, Genesis 1:28] of which dominating and controlling one's enemies is always a part.
in other words, the struggle to dominate and establish control over authoritarianism on the path to achieving anarchist living conditions is liable to transform one into an authoritarian. to struggle 'against the state' is to 'recognize the state' as the force that must be dominated since it [appears to] 'stand between' the goals of anarchism and control orientation of the state.
but this ['standing between'] is not true. the EZLN made it clear that their liberation movement is not a battle with the government of the state of mexico [they don't believe in it or 'recognize' its authority], but TO LIBERATE THEMSELVES from authoritarian beliefs and practices. insofar as the authoritarians of the sovereign state of mexico try to stop them from doing this, they are put in a position of self-defense to ward off the authoritarians space-control freaks.
the authoritarian state was therefore NOT standing between them and their actualizing of anarchist mode, it was nipping at their heels as they were actually actualizing anarchist mode.
paranoia, for authoritarians, is fear of losing control over the space they are living in.
the paranoia being discussed in this anarchistnews article concerns the fear of being crushed by the control-seeking machinery of authoritarianism.
the zapatistas have their stronghold in chiapas where anarchist mode is being operationalized. when the zapatistas have an internet forum the mind-body split is not so severe. when anarchists operating as 'outlaw' individuals dilutely dispersed within the authoritarian incumbency have an internet forum, security exposures are very different. intellectual connecting can be more secure if it is not split off from physical connecting; e.g; kim jong un can speak and act more or less as he pleases from out of the refuge of his hermit state similarly;
"Located in the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming, “The Hole-in-the-Wall” was a perfect hiding spot for the outlaws due to the hardly accessible road leading to it.
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Although the gangs operated separately, they supported each other, formed coalitions, and often shared hiding places, where they took refuge from the law. These hideouts provided the gangs with security and were hard to find. One of the most famous places of this kind was the Hole-in-the-Wall.
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The hideout functioned from the 1860’s to 1910, and in those 50 years, no lawmen successfully entered Hole-in-the-Wall."
evidently, the security of communicating freely and acting freely rises with the cost of controlling what is said and done.
As Einstein said, 'space is a participant in physical phenomena'.
this is true in the case of communications; i.e. the security in freely communicating and practicing heretical protocols rises in proportion to the costs of controlling and extinguishing them.
logical analysis puts intention into an unnatural primacy over situation. if you ask me what i am doing, i may say that 'i am sailing to hawaii', even as the weather patterns are inductively orchestrating my very tortuous and twisty path to hawaii. logically, what i say is true, but as with science and rational thought in general, logic drops out the primary influence which is situational, as if 'space were NOT a participant in physical phenomena'.
and may you -eventually- arrive to hawaii…
-yours, truly-forever, in Anarchism,
I Am The Situation
Yes emile, the activists have conquered sin but been imprisoned by their own righteousness and by their secrets, just as the authoritarians have been.
unfortunately, the standard that we are operating in, within this forum, puts rationality into an unnatural precedence over experience based intuition, which puts your views into a very small minority.
in terms of 'negative causality', Western noun-and-verb language-and-grammar blinds us to the experienced physical reality where it is impossible to construct [positive causality] a city in the forest without destroying [negative causality] some forest.
logical analysis can prove the 'truth' of both the constructive view and the 'truth' of the destructive view. the colonizers can prove their case that they constructed wonderful new infrastructure and the colonized peoples can prove their case that the same colonizer actions destroyed wonderful established infrastructure.
as Nietzsche says, perspectivism is the result since progressivists and their social-political values support the positive causal 'reality' while conservative and their social-political values support the negative causal 'reality'. e.g. why have a government 'affordable care act' when the old way was for families and friends to take care of one another,... constructing wonderful new infrastructure in the same fell stroke destroys wonderful established infrastructure [it re-wires p2p relations through central authority mediation].
in the physical reality of our actual experience, 'construction' [positive causality] and 'destruction' [negative causality] are reciprocal complementary sides of the same coin, and this coinage is 'relational transformation', the only possible dynamic in a transforming relational continuum.
of course, science, reason, rationality, logic are 'dualist' approaches to understanding that are not capable of 'non-dualist' understanding, so that the scientific progressivists will be in an interminable opposition with scientific conservatives, the former arguing that they are building a wonderful new infrastructure and the latter arguing that they are destroying a wonderful established infrastructure, both being able to prove the truth of their logical claims. A logical paradox exposure that is described by Goedel's theorem of the incompleteness of all finite systems of logic.
this logical argument between two different value-laden perspectives is not necessarily symmetrical since the positive causal faction is anthropocentric. that is, the continuing progression of infrastructure construction is anthropocentrist while the destruction of established infrastructure includes much of value to the four-legged, the finned and winged ones, the rooted ones etc; i.e. 'progress' is progressively destroying that which is of value to the diversity of participants in the relational continuum [who shall speak for wolf?], replacing it with new anthropocentric values oriented infrastructure.
the semantic reality of Western society is a view looking through one-sided 'positive causality' lenses which assumes that such 'improvements on nature' is what God intended man to do [Genesis 1:28]. This is, in fact, the basis of 'the right of property ownership' in Western society;
" “God, when he gave the world in common to all mankind, commanded man, … to subdue the earth; i.e., improve it for the benefit of life, and therein lay out something upon it that was his own, his labour. He that in obedience to this commandment of God, subdued, tilled and sowed any part of it, thereby annexed to it something that was his property, which another had no title to, nor could without injury take from him” – John Locke, 1690.
Must we always RE-present 'actions' as originating from ideas in the heads of humans seen as 'intelligent machines'? e.g - the popular view of anarchists as intelligent beings driven by some utopian theory lodged in their heads?
What if we took Emerson's understanding of man as a 'vent' that transmits influences from the vast and universal to the point on which his/nature's genius can act [this is a 'NONLOCAL (epigenetic) GENIUS' and NOT a 'LOCAL GENIUS'].
Supposing we wanted to understand the world in such terms; i.e. in relational terms. How about using Trump's attack on Syria as an example. In order to avoid all dependency on 'being' (nouns), we could understand 'each person' by imagining the individual as the centre of real relational influence; we might try to draw this as radial lines coming from the person to important influences on his behaviour; e.g. his wife, his children, his siblings, his parents and grand-parents, his cultural teachers.
this 'drawing' would be like describing influences within a fluid dynamic such as atmospherics; i.e. they would describe an infinite dimensional space; i.e a transforming relational continuum. that is, these relational 'flow-of-influence' lines would pay no attention to 'boundaries in space' or 'boundaries in time'. that is, the lines radiating out from an individual would wrap around the earth, and they would expose the present to influence from relational situations in the remote past [as in PTSD and experientially conditioned behaviour (the general case)].
Our experience informs us that, not only do these webs of relational influence exist, they develop relational tensions within them that can spawn storms, like electrical storms in the atmosphere.
Such a 'diagram' would no longer employ fixed identity local things, each 'person' or 'group', instead of being a 'thing-in-itself', being 'a relational activity'; an animated nexus of relational influences whose lines of influence spread out in spacetime and are deeply rooted in the transforming relational continuum.
This thingless spacetime connectedness is a modern physics interpretation of the physical reality of our actual relational experience.
Holding on to this relational view which acknowledges no 'nouns' as 'things-in-themselves' that 'do stuff'; we can superimpose over top of it the usual 'independent systems' view in which we suppose that the actions of the system jumpstart from authoritarian control centres (brains, central processing units) of the notional 'independently-existing 'systems-in-themselves'; as we allude to with semantic constructs such as; ---'the US attacks Syria'.
This superimposed 'semantic reality' delivers great 'economy of thought' since it seems to 'make sense' in spite of its over-simplicity and its ignoring of the 'physically real details. that is, 'the US attacks Syria' ignores the spacetime relational influence matrix and is reduced to a subject and object pair, a 'doer-of-the-deed' and a 'done-to', .... actor and acted upon, transmitter and receiver. The impression is that 'the US' is an 'independent intelligent system' whose actions are jumpstarted from out of its interior [even though, as a relational matrix within a complex of relational matrices, it doesn't have an inside (it is not a thing-in-itself)].
Of course, physical reality is not nearly so neat and tidy as semantic reality and if we consult the relational matrix view, the subject 'US' shows up as a matrix of influences connecting Mar-a-Lago with ships in the Mediterranean, through 'repeater stations' that are themselves the nexa of relational influences. [e.g. 'mutiny' refers to when normal relational influence routing is transformed].
The notion of a 'strike' transmitted by a doer and received by a 'done-to' is a LOGICAL notion which doesn't go down to the level of relational influences, thus a 'strike' to eliminate Saddam, ... a 'strike'.to eliminate Qaddafy, or a 'strike' to 'eliminate a troublesome behaviour of Assad', ... all of these are logical concepts which ignore the relational matrix complex and the relational tensions that develop within it.
In 'semantic reality', we have the concept of the 'successful accomplishment' of a logical action such as 'one thing-in-itself' attacking 'another 'thing-in-itself' where goals are specified; 'to eliminate an unwanted person, regime or an unwanted behaviour'. The problem is, these logical actions and objectives are all based on 'notional things-in-themselves', while in the physical reality of our actual experience, we are messing around within a relational complex that includes us (as nexa within an unbounded, thingless spacetime connectedness, a sea of mutual influence).
The deeper view of the 'strike' then, is akin to the relational tension induced 'zap' of an avalanche in a pile of sand when tensions exceed tolerance limits and reconfiguration (to reduce relational tensions) is induced which is fuelled by potential energy accruing through relational tensions.
In a relational language and mode of understanding, there are no 'things-in-themselves' to use to RE-present relational dynamics in the inverted terms of 'things' and 'who is doing what to whom' viz. 'the US attacked Syria'.
As we have seen, the physical reality understood in relational terms informs us that 'epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression'. Thus our logical game which we use to model and predict dynamics in terms of the cause-effect actions of fixed identity players; e.g. Iraq, Syria, Turkey, fails to acknowledge the natural primacy of relations over 'things', and thus the real-time emergence of jihadist groups including Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar, Khorasan group, Suqour al-Ezz, Imam Bukhari Jamaat, Katibat al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, Army of Muhammad (Idlib), Jamaat al-Murabitin, Bin Laden Front, Jaysh al-Ahrar, Al-Bara, Dhu Nurayn, Al-Sawa'iq, Usud Al-Har Battalion, Sham Army, Inghimasi units, Ansar Jihad (coordinating, more or less under ‘the Al Nusra front’ that is aligned against Bashir al Assad, not to mention Kurdish and other factions in the region.
Whether the sarin gas was held in stockpile by 'the army of Muhammed' as the Assad regime claims; Syrian army conducted an air raid on arms depot belonging to Al-Nusra Front that contained chemical weapons , the question remains as to whether the logical 'semantic reality constructions' using 'fixed identity logical elements' such as 'Syria' and 'the US' should be put into an unnatural precedence over the relational influence matrix of our actual experience.
In terms of the logical view, when ISIS was winning, it seems logical that 'the US' would cast in their lot with Syria and Russia in trying to defeat ISIS. Now that Syria and the Russians have seemingly broken the back of ISIS, it seems logical that 'the US' would adjust their strategy to undermine Assad's Syria as part of their ongoing 'regime change' program, to populate middle east leader posts with lackeys'.
Of course, this did not work out so well in Libya due the fact that 'support for' or 'attacks on' logical elements and the goals and objectives they claim to support, fails to acknowledge that epigenetic influence is inductively actualizing genetic expression; i.e. the semantic realities we construct using notional 'things-in-themselves' (logical elements) such as 'Syria', 'Iraq', 'Turkey' are simple labels pasted over top of a far more relationally complex dynamic which eludes simple naming convention based narratives.
There are many 'potholes' or 'power vacuums' in the middle east outback, and the need to fill them is inductively actualizing genetic expression in many different forms. The traditional 'binning managers' who claim the right to determine how the world should be binned and how potholes should be filled are now exercising their self-appointed regulatory and enforcement powers to preserve the semantic reality they have, with great loss of life (of others, mostly) established over the past century/s.
If just anyone with interest in sustaining local welfare appointed themselves to come and fill in power vacuums, it would be 'anarchy'.
the 'actor' that language invents to give force to an 'action' is 'the ego'. one has to suspend the ego to 'get' what Whorf is saying about the artificiality of the actor-action split that is built into Indo-European language architecture;
“In its origin language belongs in the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology. We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a faculty. Today we know that it is only a word.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’
'epigenetic influence that is inductively actualizing genetic expression' goes missing in our semantic reconstructions. in other words, the animating source that is immanent in nature is 'ripped out' and re-inserted into 'things' by Indo-European language architecture. 'rebellion' as the genetic expression that is inductively actualized by epigenetic influence [relational tensions] is replaced by 'rebels' who are seen as 'causal agents' that instigate rebellion, ignoring the obvious, that rebellion is induced by conditions within the interdependent relational matrix of the social collective, and manifests through rebelling activity, BUT DOES NOT JUMPSTART FROM 'rebel causal agents'.
instead of rebels being the jumpstart cause of rebellion [as in Euclidian space framing that reduces space to void] there is 'rebelling activity'. Behaviours in a tensioned, heated environment are inductively actualized, in the manner that 'popping' is induced in a crowd of 'corns' in a hot pan, so that it is tempting to describe what happens 'the corns are popping', as if they are sourcing their behaviour, rather than epigenetic influence. Language with its fixed Euclidian frame imposing, space-voiding view, would have it that 'the corns' are the authors of their own popping as in 'the corn is popping' ['the rebels are rebelling'].
This is a 'set-up' for a moral judging based justice system, as in the religious view wherein man is seen as an independent being that is fully and solely responsible for his own behaviour. This view was concretized by the invention of abstract, phonetic alphabet based language that allowed the capture of oral discourse in written scripts so that semantic constructions were to take over from oral tradition in providing 'grounding' for 'what is real';
Around 500 BC, the emergent Hebrew belief extracted God from nature and made Him transcendent (i.e. God, as the creative power immanent in Nature (e.g. the 'Great Spirit'), was separated out of Nature and put above it). This was the beginning of a radical break with the past views of ancient people, as is alluded to by Frankfort et al in 'The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man', who point out that; "... the fundamental assumptions that the individual is part of society, that society is embedded in nature, and that nature is but the manifestation of the divine." ... and that up until that time, ... "This doctrine was, in fact, universally accepted by the people of the ancient world with the single exception of the Hebrews" ... was subsumed by the arrival of abstract symbol based script(ures) and the use of symbols in constructing symbol-based (semantic) 'realities'."
Western science, which is based on Indo-European language-and-grammar architecture, continues its authoritarian stewardship of the portrait of man as separate from, and above, a purely material version of 'nature'.
"According to contemporary scholars, the original Hebrew script developed alongside others in the region (the region is the Land of Cannan and Arabia) during the course of the late second and first millennia BCE; it is closely related to the Phoenician script, which itself probably gave rise to the use of alphabetic writing in Greece (Greek)." -- Wikipedia
If one were to poll Western and indigenous people as to 'the cause of rebellion', the three possible answers would probably come out something like this;
1. rebels are the cause of rebellion. (69%) indig, (0%)
2. oppressors are the cause of rebellion.(29%) indig. (0%)
3. rebellion is epigenetically induced by relational tensions (2%) indig. (100%)
That is, "causal agency" and "being" are not valid concepts in the relational language architectures of indigenous aboriginals. Instead; .. 'it takes a whole community to raise a rebel' [i.e. for the all-including relational web to develop relational tensions that induce rebellious activity].
The concept of a transcendent God and a subordinate nature which became the basic tenet of Western religious belief, by implication, banishes the deities in nature [epigenetic influence immanent in nature]. Not only did nature lose its divine status (it was henceforth only a reflection of God's greatness), but the investing of God's will through man subordinated (non-human) nature to the will of man, and alienated man from nature in the process.
Once the ego had, in this way, been activated by language, the genie was 'out of the bottle' (the animating genius immanent in nature was notionally removed from nature and re-located into the interior of man). to take away the credited accomplishments from the semantically fabricated man-the-actor, and give them back to the 'epigenetic influence' immanent in nature (the transforming relational continuum) along with restoring the understanding that man is a relational form included in a relational dynamic greater than himself, is something that the 'ego' (the local view of personhood/self that sees itself as an independent causal agent that is fully and solely responsible for his own actions and accomplishments), is continuing to fiercely resist.
The world is given only once, as a transforming relational continuum.
'The state' is a logical BEING-based concept that stands or falls on the basis of having a quorum of people believing in it. The pre-colonization indigenous people (anarchists) did not put logical concepts into an unnatural primacy over the physical reality of our actual experience as the colonizers continue to do, though many indigenous have, after centuries, been 'co-opted' into belief in the 'existence' of the state, or in going along with it and letting their lives be shaped by it.
The concept of 'the wild' as something that exists independent of 'the state' or independent of 'civilization' is the same sort of binary BEING based logical splitting of the one-world into two separate realms. There is only one physically real world in our actual experience.
As McLuhan says, the purportedly 'real' infrastructure that people or states claim they construct is, in physical reality, a transforming of the physically real relational space of our actual experience. When we say that we construct a factory in the jungle and start talking about 'the wild' as everything that lies beyond the perimeter fence of the factory, we are constructing a logic-based 'semantic reality since these are not 'two' separate realms, but two logical concepts we impose on the world.
We can say that "it is impossible to construct a factory in the jungle (wild) without destroying some jungle (wild), but this is a BEING-based semantic reality construction. 'construction' and 'destruction' do not exist as two separate actions in the physical space of our actual experience; there is only one world and it only has one dynamic and that is 'relational transformation'. 'creation' and 'destruction' are logical binary concepts that derive from BEING-based language and grammar; i.e. without 'being', there is no 'creation' and no 'destruction'.
until the colonizing crazies came from europe and hung their pictures of king george or king leopold everywhere, in the tradition of Pope and Church [and later, president and state], to set up a high-priest mediator as 'eyes' for us to see beyond our own 'limited vision', like a captain above calling down to his crew below, barking out instructions to us which purportedly would avoid this or that obstacle or guide us into safe channels, ... we had no need of such mediation. we understood ourselves as included in nature, not in a war of domination with it. the fear of nature derives from a logical splitting apart of man and nature.
just as there is no BEING and no state, outside of logical idealizations that shape the behaviours of 'believers', there are no hunter-gatherers. hunting and gathering are activities that, as Nietzsche points out, are reduced to dualist actor-action logical structures by two complementary errors of grammar (a) imputing of BEING to a relational activity, and (b) imputing of God-like jumpstart powers of authorship of actions to the BEING invented in (a). Meanwhile, the author says;
"Our lineage, as nomadic hunter-gatherers, still shapes the way we see, interact and understand the world. That is a lineage shaped by millions of years of egalitarian, anarchistic existence. That is a lineage that defines each of us"
there are no lineages. lineages are a logical concept that serves to keep BEING-based Darwinist pseudo-realities from spontaneously collapsing. meanwhile, an ecosystem is a web of interdependent, transforming-in-the-now, relations wherein 'epigenetic' influence is inductively actualizing 'genetic expression'. only if one denies inhabitant-habitat non-duality is one left holding the bag of having to explain the persistence of 'categories of being' through 'hereditary lineages'. 'genes' are hereditary markers that are epigenetically actualized and capture a record of what is unfolding, they do not have their own God-like powers of creation.
"“As is described by Nijhout, genes are “not self-emergent,” that is genes can not turn themselves on or off. If genes can’t control their own expression, how can they control the behavior of the cell? Nijhout further emphasizes that genes are regulated by “environmental signals.” Consequently, it is the environment that controls gene expression. Rather than endorsing the Primacy of DNA, we must acknowledge the Primacy of the Environment!” —Bruce Lipton, ‘The New Biology’
To conceive of and portray what is going on today in terms of a battle between a hibernating/recessive lineage of 'wildists' and a now-dominating strain of 'civilizeds' is to fall into the trap of putting BEING-based logic into an unnatural primacy over experience-based intuition. these two categories of 'being' DO NOT EXIST in the physical reality of our actual experience because 'BEING' cannot and does not exist in a transforming-in-the-now relational continuum.
The belief in fixed identity BEINGS is the root source of modern dysfunction. it is a language game of the same sort as 'science' where we move as if we knew what we were doing, declare (logical) success and fuck everything up (the elimination of Saddam which is at the same time the rise of ISIS).
'Assad' and 'Syria' are not 'real things'. they are logical terms superimposed over an unfathomably complex relational physical activity, as with 'Katrina', a solar irradiance fuelled, ocean-current-stirred atmospheric activity reduced by complementary errors of grammar to an actor-action logical combination. 'Trump' and 'the US' are likewise 'not real' as they are talked up by the media but name-tags referring to complex relational activity, as with Katrina.
The elimination of Assad or Trump is logically possible, just as the elimination of Saddam was logically possible, but in the physical reality of our actual experience, the eliminatory intervention into a relationally interdependent space engenders externalities and induces transformation in the complex relational dynamic that is nothing like the surgically precise excisions of logical space wherein 'Saddam 'is', then poof, 'Saddam 'is not''. Headless chickens can also run amok and the relational activity that the 'head' slots into is something other than a passive body that whispers 'your wish is my command' into the ear of each newly slotting 'head-of-state' as it equips him with his own twitter account and nuclear missile launching joystick.
as nietzsche pointed out, we have the bad habit of reducing our view of 'self' to notional 'independent beings' with internal process driven and directed behaviours. we perform this reduction using two compensating errors of grammar; (a) we impute 'being' to relational activity, and (b) we impute God-like powers of jumpstarting action to the 'being' we just created in the first error of grammar. then we can talk about whether our creation is going to be 'violent' or 'non-violent' etc.etc.
it is naive to believe that we are disconnected from ongoing violence in the global relational social collective. for the indigenous anarchist, the understanding is 'we are all related' (mitakuye oyasin), and 'it takes a whole community to raise a violent child'.
but when the leaders of the colonizing powers sit around their meeting room tables, they all agree that it is the iraqis, syrians, afghanis, libyans, palestinians etc. that have chosen the path of violence. The US persuaded the Japanese to abandon the path of violence in 1945, and Obama's drone programs have been aimed at reducing violence in the middle east. Americans, Brits and French abhor violence and have done much to keep their citizens supporting the ethic of non-violence, not only by bombing the shit out of violent people like syrians and iraqi's (muslims, you know) but by shutting their doors to the violent refugee hordes that are fleeing the bombs and threatening to contaminate the non-violent social groups of Europe with violent types.
for those anarchists who see themselves as 'included in the world', the world is already a violent place, and so the issue is how to restore balance and harmony within the often violent global social matrix.
only for those anarchists that consider themselves and/or their 'groups' as 'things-in-themselves' and thus reduce themselves and/or their groups (by a double error of grammar) to notional actor-action agents does the question arise as to whether 'to be violent' or 'non-violent'.
for those of us who believe we are included in the world, we are already contributors to violence and so certain acts on our part to restore balance and harmony (and reduce violence), viewed by certain others [e.g. the moral stewards, regulators and enforcers who set up barriers behind which violence can persist with impunity] as 'violent acts', may be violence-reducing acts.
"an action in itself is quite devoid of value ; the whole question is this: who performed it? One and the same ” crime ” may, in one case, be the greatest privilege, in the other infamy. As a matter of fact, it is the selfishness of the judges which interprets an action (in regard to its author) according as to whether it was useful or harmful to themselves (or in relation to its degree of likeness or unlikeness to them).”— Nietzsche on ‘Morality’ and ‘Herd Behaviour’ in ‘The Will to Power’
the only way for any person or group to practice non-violence is to declare oneself or one's group to be an 'independently-existing thing-in-itself'' and then pretend they live in a world of independent entities that purportedly inhabit a space that is independent of the independent entities that reside, operate and interact within it; i.e. a 'reality' that is not the physical reality of our actual experience but a 'semantic reality' wherein these idealizations are made possible by language-game-play wherein, 'when we dream together, it is reality', like the semantic realities of imperialists, statists, communists, capitalists etc.
i think there is some common ground in our comments. you say;
"I think the reality that we are all (or should be) connected with the world at large is an important point."
i would add that language bewitches our understanding [has us ignore the physical reality of our inclusion in a transforming relational world] in that we use it to construct 'semantic realities' in which we portray ourselves as 'independent things-in-ourselves' as in Genesis 1:28, a model that urges us to control and dominate [use violence], or else be 'at the mercy of' the uncertainties and violence of nature.
there is an implication of subject-driven determinism in your statement;
"What matters is that we keep moving, everywhere, in the right direction, and that we do not limit of tactics based on ideoology alone. We need to utalize what works".
'what works' can imply two very different assumptions about self and the world; i.e.
(a) for an indigenous anarchist, 'we are all interdependently included in a common web of life' that is inherently beyond our control, so that 'the goal' is NOT to deterministically construct a 'desired future state' but to act so as to sustain balance and harmony in the interdependent web of relations.
(b) for a Western culture conditioned person, humans are 'independent beings' whose behaviours are driven more by their internal beliefs and intentions (ideologies and ethical values) than by the relational situations they find themselves experiencing. this leads to the building of 'movements' based on 'categories' of people with fixed 'identities' defined by their values and intentions. e.g. the current clamoring that immigrants should not be allowed into a state unless they have 'the right values'. Because Western people define themselves by their internal values and intentions, their leaders are able to 'manage them' by appeals to the values that define them as 'Americans, Brits, Germans, even when this involves submission to horrific 'situations'.
Only rarely does this dominant practice of putting intention into an unnatural precedence over situation revert to the natural precedence of situation over identity-defined intention.
"Most famously the Christmas Truce of 1914, saw men from the trenches on the Western Front venture into no man's land to share presents, sing carols and play football. Each other's trenches were inspected, stories swapped. But incredible as the unofficial truce was, it was far from unique.
.. Soldiers describe the banter heard across the Western Front - whether it was a simple "guten morgen Tommy" shouted over no man's land ... to... notice boards put up over the parapet ... "Today is BANK HOLIDAY Tommies. Do not fire - give us a rest,"
That is, it would be 'NATURAL" for the workers of the world, finding themselves in a common deplorable situation, to orient to the restoring of relational-situational balance and harmony, and to let that epigenetic influence inductively actualize their actions, overriding the orientation to their categorical identities [in nature, diversity is rich in 'mutual support' potentials]. however, politicians play the identity politics games of 'America first' etc.which keeps those who put their category definitions in primacy over situations where inductive actualizing influence screams out the need for mutual support, ... in their respective 'battle trenches' based on their 'category definitions'.
indigenous anarchists are not the people described in Genesis 1:28 who are separate and above the dynamics of Nature and notionally equipped with the God-powers of deterministically constructing a desired future state, so instead of trying to assemble a categorical definition based constructivist army, our orientation is to the unfolding relational situations we find ourselves included in, and our ethic is to employ mutual support in cultivating, restoring and sustaining relational balance and harmony in these situations.
Problem: --- Western science conceives of humans as 'independent organisms' as in Genesis 1:28, which puts scientific thinkers into the 'category-overrides-situation' orientation, which not only removes the banter among those that find themselves in the trenches in opposition based on their category definitions, but has them launching exploding missiles and drones to eliminate one another based purely on categorical definition.
So, to return to your statement; "What matters is that we keep moving, everywhere, in the right direction, and that we do not limit of tactics based on ideoology alone. We need to utalize what works".
i see three questions for you;
1. what do you intend by "we"? are we definable by our willingness to respond to the inductive actualizing pull of the relational situations we find ourselves co-included in, with their natural mutual support orchestrating powers? or are we definable by our categorical identity and the values that it stands for which keep our intentions in an unnatural primacy over the inductive actualizing pull of the relational situations we find ourselves in, such as "Anarchists first", and "Lets make Anarchism great again".
2. what do you intend by moving 'in the right direction'? does this mean that we should respond to relational situations in such a way as to subsume imbalance and associated relational tensions that are sourcing violent conflict, such as between those in management activities and those in shop-floor working activities? or does this mean we should rally those espousing our category definition to rise to the challenge of overthrowing those espousing opposing category definitions? that is, should we move so as to promote the growth and empowerment of our category definition and the decline and disempowerment of opposing category definitions, or should we move so as to reduce the imbalances in the relational social dynamic and collapse the associated relational tensions, or, if both, which should have precedence?
3. what do you intend by 'we need to utilize what works'? is the unstated objective measure of 'what works', those strategies and tactics that fuel the growth of our category membership? if our problem is the wellness of the workers of the world and we add more members in support of this in new england while imperial greatness pursuits of America overall are making global worker conditions worse, ... is there any sense is talking about a growth of category membership?
the measure used by indigenous anarchism would be 'whatever works' to wake up our brothers to the physical reality that we are NOT the people of Genesis 1:28 aka the 'independent organism people' of Western science, and thus we never will build a category of 'the certain and the good' that will rise to domination and global control, eliminating 'the uncertain and the bad' since categories are not 'real things' but baskets of measurements used to reduce activities to 'things-in-themselves', superimposed on a transforming relational continuum.
the whole problem of western civilization starts from the Genesis 1:28 belief (superstition) that now inhabits Western science, which constructs semantic realities [radically unlike the physical reality of our actual experience] that invert the natural order in things; i.e. in the physical reality of our natural experience, "epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression" but using a double error of grammar, we reduce the 'genetic expression' in the inhabitant-habitat non-dualism, called 'man', into a notional 'independent thing-in-himself' with God-powers of jumpstart-creating its own development, actions and results.
as inclusions within a world where relations are in a natural primacy over things-in-themselves, we have to let go of the notion that 'we are in control' as if we were some kind of Genesis 1:28 category of people, and settle for cultivating, restoring and sustaining balance and harmony in the continuing relational unfolding. If we see the truck about to hurtle into a crowd of pedestrians and we use our car to violently smash into it so that it comes to rest without violently colliding with the crowd, ... if we put on our Western science observer lenses and see ourselves as a Genesis 1:28 person we will say that we 'used violence' as part of our strategy to 'quell violence', but if we see ourselves as a relational activity within a relational supra-activity, then we will understand our behaviour as being inductively actualized by the unfolding relational situations we find ourselves included in.
if we put on a blue uniform and put some flashing lights on the top of our car, we can say that we used violence intentionally, to quash violence, and that is not only 'our intention' but our sworn duty to God and the president. language thus enables us to break ourselves out of the relational web by assigning ourselves a categorical identity as a 'thing-in-ourselves' with internal intention driven behaviour. Gone from the constructed semantic reality is the physically experienced reality wherein the relational situation we are in inductively actualizes, orchestrates and shapes our actions.
the young person who 'risks their life' by jumping in and rescuing an infant being swept away in a raging stream, is 'accused' of being a MODEST hero by reporters when she insists that what she did just came naturally to her, .. while the reporters are going on about selflessness, altruism and all these grand concepts and theories to explain why people do the things they do AFTER science has stripped them out of their inhabitant-habitat relational non-duality and made them over into notional 'independent things-in-themselves' driven and directed fully and solely by their internal intentions, then being forced to make up stories to explain the animating motivations of internally-driven independent beings like 'pursuit of self-interest' within win/lose competition for scarce resources (Darwinism) sometimes over-ridden by 'altruism' which is the selfless love for 'one independent being' for another 'independent being'.
In an anarchist community, there are no 'independent beings', no Gods, no masters, ... only relational dynamics that invite the participants to co-cultivate balance and harmony within the transforming relational continuum that is innately beyond our control.
yes, there is increasing abstraction. this comes from language; i.e. 'science' comes from language (the reduction of relational dynamics to being-based causation).
we have become increasingly 'literate' and communications technologies are substituting semantic depictions for physically real experience.
'semantic reality' that derive from being-based RE-PRESENTATIONS has become our 'operative reality' that directs our behaviours, eclipsing the physical reality of our actual relational experience (our 'intuition').
but the 'ruling class' is akin to the 'passenger virus' view of HIV, in the (on target) allegation that HIV does not cause AIDS; i.e. it looks like the smoking gun but in the sense of staphylococcus pneumoniae that shows up together with a vitamin C deficiency.
another analogy is found in William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell. As he says, the poets alluded to the 'geniuses' of nature found in cities and states and rivers etc. and this led to 'priest' class who took these poetics literally, imputing that God put this power into separate things. the priests then became the expert mediators or seeing-dog eyes of the blind masses.
in our modern society, scientific experts who are in charge of telescopes and microscopes play a similar role.
the point is that we have two choices of reality; (1.) the physical reality of our actual relational experience which we intuit, and (2.) a being-based semantic reality coming from language and grammar, .... and Western civilization has been elevating semantic reality into an unnatural primacy over experiential physical reality.
in physical reality, epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression (local, visible, material dynamics). in a physical world given only once, matter and material dynamics are 'appearances' or 'variations in the relational structure of space' [relational forms in the transforming relational continuum], as Schroedinger, Bohm and others put it. If we experience inclusion in a storm-cell and use semantic reality to phantomize it as 'Katrina' who we say 'is growing larger and stronger', is giving a violent lashing to New Orleans' and fleshing out a 'semantic reality' that reduces a relational activity to a being based cause-and-effect dynamic, we are in effect substituting our abstract 'semantic reality' for the physical reality of our actual experience.
This is where the growth of abstraction is coming from, ... from shifting our belief base over from the physical reality of our actual experience, to the semantic reality of our noun-and-verb Indo-European/scientific language-and-grammar.
The fact is that because logic is inherently subjective and incomplete, it can generate many contradicting propositions, even though each one can be 'proven true' and thus firmly believed in by those with a certain set of values that they have used in cherry-picking the observational data to formulate the proposition. see the excellent article on this by alexis papazoglou, 'The Post-Truth Era of Trump is What Nietzsche Predicted'
The values of the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island can be used to formulate the proposition that the colonizers are destroying a wonderful established world on Turtle Island while the colonizers can use their values to formulate the proposition that they are constructing a wonderful new world in the Americas. Both propositions can be proven true.
The general point is that there are many abstract 'semantic realities' that can be proven true; i.e. there is no such thing as 'truth', but there are a hell of a lot of 'believers' rallying around their diverse multiplicity of preferred, abstract 'semantic reality' and making them into their 'operative realities'.
To the indigenous colonized peoples, it is clear that the source of 'terrorism' is not 'terrorists' but relational tensions arising from centuries long abuse of indigenous peoples by colonizers [these roots go back even deeper into the transforming relational continuum]. It is convenient for colonizers to logically propose that the terrorists actions jumpstart from the interior of terrorists. In that way, the colonizing powers can retain their proposition they are righteous and innocent and the victims of independent thing-in-themselves evil agents.
In other words, the only way to decide whose abstract 'semantic reality' is the 'true semantic reality' is by the principle of Lafontaine; "la raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure" (the logic of the most powerful is always the best).
The 'rulers' are those who administer the 'rules' and the 'rules' are based on 'semantic realities' formulated by the 'rulers'; e.g;
"Terrorism: --- the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims".
The rulers authorize, exclusively for themselves, the LAWFUL use of violence and intimidation against the unlawful users of violence and intimidation.
All of this is based on the construction of abstract 'semantic realities' which are taken to be 'true' although NOT supported by any absolute truth since there is no such thing;
" What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
.
We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors—in moral terms: the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all." -- Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense
The rulers are not the 'source' of the growth of abstraction, the growth of abstraction is the 'source' of 'rulers'.
In William Blake's observation, the 'priests' are not the 'source' of the growth of monotheist belief, the growth of monotheist belief was the source of priests; i.e. Blake saw priests as opportunists whose job openings resulted from people making literal interpretations of poetic inference [the inference that a genius inhabited a social organizing such as a city and was the source of its development and continuing dynamic]. As we know, Darwin and Darwinism used this same ploy to explain the origin of species seen as 'independently-existing categories of things-in-themselves, using the word 'gene' to connote ultimate jumpstart 'genetic agency'. Nietzsche mocked this notion in his 'anti-Darwin' writings, suggesting instead that epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression', ... the same understanding as Lamarck, and the understanding that is slowly overtaking Darwinism [in the face of huge political resistance since it is a Trojan Horse that defends the notion that 'independent things-in-themselves' can be fully and solely causally responsible for their own actions and results (implying an absolute space and absolute time operating theatre and thus NO epigenetic influence)]
Nevertheless, research has demonstrated that epigenetic influence is primary, not genetic expression, ... as the relational understanding of modern physic also insists;
“As is described by Nijhout, genes are “not self-emergent,” that is genes can not turn themselves on or off. If genes can’t control their own expression, how can they control the behavior of the cell? Nijhout further emphasizes that genes are regulated by “environmental signals.” Consequently, it is the environment that controls gene expression. Rather than endorsing the Primacy of DNA, we must acknowledge the Primacy of the Environment!” —Bruce Lipton, ‘The New Biology’
The continuing rise to dominance of abstraction comes from the continuing shift of belief-grounding, from the physical reality of our actual relational experience, to the construction of logical 'semantic realities' which suffers from 'perspectivism' [semantic realities are based on 'appearances'; i.e. by using visible forms as absolute foundational elements when they are relational features in a flow that is greater than them in the sense that every system is included in a relational suprasystem' (the transforming relational continuum)].
The way out of this is to make use of 'learning circles' [as used by indigenous anarchists] where actual physical experience is shared, rather than debating which, among a diverse multiplicity of being-based semantic realities deserves to be installed as 'the operative reality', a political process in which 'la raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure'.
maybe, essential to actual-being, is the capacity to dominate abstractionz, or to navigate them, to be aware , even to put them in-place by commanding them by name, is reversing their power-struggle; to be versed(word?) in the art of abstraction.and what if this isn't about some Humanity ? and even the fish and microbes and non-sentient particulates or just all doing it! , you know? like, you got to get-up to get-down? all-for-one and one-for-all, like the freedom to electric-volution; whereby a-being is charged with integrity via the grounded (natural, sagaic-harmonic) connection between negative and positive forces like hitting and fielding or Mary and Joseph, as an endlessly reciprocating flux or cosmic dynamism?
then the "problem" isn't the growth of abstraction but (our) general tendency to forgetting that symbols are abstracted, and have no meaning of-themselves. and thus the abundant, non-dual, oddities of the (5 dimensional)common-world are mistaken by the scientific witness or objective participant for the normal(binary), 4 dimensional real-ity. So, Being as one-self requires a constant connection to their innate source and purpose, a traction upon the epigenetic plenum. such is ecstasy or joy, to come, out-of from the tattered shatter , ever-turning into .
whereas; existential delusion or state authority, God (and émile?) -which objectify experiential knowledge- would place the truth-of-reality in our so-called physical, once-given, big-bang Situation where one is obliged (nay, confined!) only to go "with-the-flow" and a dreamer's suffering (to be, going and doing) is declared futile, -an egoic fantasy to direct the course or steward a paradise-.
I say!; there is no Plenum!
there is only the relative Magic of Ego to abstract means of every-little spectacular vortex,
toward the coming elementary surrection!
it's difficult (impossible) to comment on holistic imagery without losing its holistic dimensionality.
it seems to me that you've captured the main points of the holistic relational world view, although i would use some different word-labels than you. excuse me for reducing your language-transcending relational package by selecting a few portals to discuss the 'view'.
1. the fifth dimension: i would call this the infinite dimensional view since, as in the study of fluid dynamics, when every elemental influence is simultaneously influencing every elemental influence, the problem, mathematically, would be infinite dimensional. one might refer to the 'medium of influence' as 'wave space' since that defines wave dynamics; i.e. every 'point' (let's call it every 'elemental influence' since everywhere in the medium, outside-inward [receiving, integrating] influence is inductively actualizing inside-outward [transmitting, differentiating] influence.
this comes up towards the end your comment where you suggest that 'there is no plenum', only the "relative Magic of Ego" [compares to Nietzsche's big sagacity natural Self]. this is unlike your earlier reference to ego of the lesser type [Nietzsche's 'little sagacity ego-self].
in the symmetry of "epigenetic influence inductively actualizing genetic expression', there is only one dynamic here, a 'resonance-in-itself' which is, as the same time, 'the invisible mystery or magic of the natural Self and the manifest being of the ego-self'. we are 'both at the same time', as also in the Vedic symmetry of Brahman = Atman cited by Schroedinger.
Example: Schroedinger's Cat:
Supposing that Donald Trump is hatching political or business plans inside a large ship that is crossing the North Atlantic that 'could be' the Titanic. Trump is in 'little sagacity ego-self mode', not yet having awakened to the futility of the existential dream in which one is oneself a big-bang explosion or 'genetic expression', and dreams of making use of one's one-way exfusional fountainheading in " an egoic fantasy to direct the course or steward a paradise-.
Note that the indigenous anarchist also travelling on this "ship", in big sagacity natural Self mode, would celebrate being included as an 'agent of transformation [storm-cell in the flow] within the never-beginning, never-ending transforming relational dynamic, as recalls Nietzsche's view;
"And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income …” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1067
Trump is planning on directing and controlling a major development (political or business plan) and inside the ship, this may be documented by video and written up by historians or whomever, and if the ship arrives safely in New York, Trump's management team will disembark and carry out this plan successfully.
But all the while these plans were being made on board the ship, in the relational suprasystem this internal Trump-directed social system was included in, icebergs were zipping past (being zipped past) and threatening to sink the ship. the symmetry of the system's inclusion in the relational suprasystem is the same whether or not the ship makes it safely to New York and whether or no Trump's plan is successfully accomplished.
Meanwhile, we know from our experience, that that success of logical plans is a semantic reality that is nothing like the physical reality of our actual experience; i.e. GW Bush's successful plan to eliminate the Saddam regime had little to do with what was actually going on because the physical reality is given by 'epigenetic influence that is inductively actualizing genetic expression'. One cannot start from 'genetic expression' and make a story out of it based on one's 'being, going and doing'. Or rather, one can make a story out of it, but such a story or 'constructed semantic reality' will depart radically from the physical reality wherein epigenetic influence is inductively actualizing genetic expression; e.g. the logically successful elimination of Saddam's regime was, at the same time, the inductive actualizer of the rise of ISIS (genetic expression).
In other words, the one-way, inside-outward genetic explosion, which is how Trump sees his project, is illusion, whether or not it succeeds logically; i.e. it is not what is really happening and all of the simple doer-deed actions credited with bringing about results are, in physical reality', interventions into the transforming relational continuum and are thus engendering UNANTICIPATED AND UNADDRESSED 'EXTERNALITIES'.
The outcome of business plans are measured in monetary terms so the 'unanticipated' and 'unaddressed' 'externalities' that are engendered never 'make the accounting books' and someone else has to 'pay for them'.
In other words, Trump's view of himself and his actions, and the public's, are semantically fabricated illusion. Sure we can define Trump by measuring him relative to an absolute space and absolute time measuring/reference frame, and likewise his being-based doer-deed actions and "accomplishments", but this is our imagination at work, stimulated by noun-and-verb Indo-European/scientific language-and-grammar.
Recall that Schroedinger composed and circulated his 'Schroedinger's Cat' paradox because he thought the probability based interpretation of quantum mechanics was bullshit. So the fact that there were non-zero probabilities for both 'alive' and 'dead' cases for the cat in the box exposed to a radioactively triggered lethal source, was his way of showing how pissed off he was with the probabilistic interpretation that was and is the officially accepted interpretation.
Schroedinger's view was that the wave view and particle view were not equivalent views but that the wave view was primary and the particle view was 'appearances'.
" “Let me say at the outset, that in this discourse, I am opposing not a few special statements of quantum physics held today (1950s), I am opposing as it were the whole of it, I am opposing its basic views that have been shaped 25 years ago, when Max Born put forward his probability interpretation, which was accepted by almost everybody.” (Schrödinger E, ‘The Interpretation of Quantum Physics’). … “I don’t like it, and I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with it.” (Erwin Schroedinger speaking about the probability-based interpretation of Quantum Physics which was legitimized by majority vote).
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“What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. Particles are just schaumkommen (appearances).”
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“The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist. …”— Schroedinger
Ok, if you 'go with Shroedinger''s view, you can see that the material/particle view is not 'real'. it is illusion. Trump's view is not real, it is illusion. The world is given only once whether Trump makes it across the Atlantic or not; i.e. the world is given as a transforming relational continuum or wave-space wherein epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression. It is illusion to treat genetic expression (the exploding gene or big-bang model of dynamics) as 'real', as in being-based, actor-action semantic reality.
Trump never paid for the externalities he engendered in his business projects, just as GW Bush didn't pay for the externalities he engendered with his 'logical success' of eliminating Saddam. If GWB had been paid when he turned in Saddam's scalp, he would also be seen as a successful businessman, regardless of conditioning the habitat dynamic so that it inductively actualized the genetic expression known as 'the rise of ISIS'.
Trump and his supporters are in 'little sagacity ego-self' mode. They believe that they are 'in control' and are pulling out bombs like Trump pulled out a fat wad of bills, knowing, from experience in business, that they can bull through and achieve the results they want. But such results are merely logical results which are 'illusion' since they do not address or anticipate the engendering of 'externalities' which is ALWAYS the physically real case. Trump is not in control of what he is inductively actualizing.
The indigenous anarchist, meanwhile, recognizes that he is an 'agent of transformation' that is included in a relational dynamic inherently greater than himself, and not a simple 'doer-of-deeds'.
There are not 'two selves' here [the world and self are only given once], there is only 'one self', and it is not the self that can control and dominate nature, but the self that is included in a relational dynamic that is greater than himself.
There is only the wave self while the particle self that is understood as a genetic exploding (big bang) is illusion based on variations in the relational wave structure of space.
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It seems to me that this is similar to the implications of your holistic vision, non?
He gets the job done, builds the house.
while Ol Mare she's a rebel, holds space
-makes the home- she's solid. She's the primordial catcher
holding down the potholes, maintaining the omnipotent void while unconditionally accepting the ebbing and flooding tides of seminal expression which is always hopelessly subject to her preference . their child is the one who makes the world new,
-whose blood is the ceremonial decoration for our beautiful little encapsulations -
what fun! into the streets for Good Friday!
and back to el campo for Easter.
(the city is no place for children's play!)
science is killing us. there is no objective meaning in an action
" an action in itself is quite devoid of value ; the whole question is this: who performed it? One and the same ” crime ” may, in one case, be the greatest privilege, in the other infamy. As a matter of fact, it is the selfishness of the judges which interprets an action (in regard to its author) according as to whether it was useful or harmful to themselves (or in relation to its degree of likeness or unlikeness to them).”— Nietzsche on ‘Morality’ and ‘Herd Behaviour’ in ‘The Will to Power’
In other words, we bring "our own values in" to give meaning to an action. When I see a man kissing another man, my culture-conditioned 'straightness' [which i have learned to moderate] tends to make me feel repulsed by this act, thus i see the act as repulsive and people engaging in it as 'repulsive'.
As Nietzsche further points out, this leads to 'perspectivism' since we all bring our own differing values to the process of giving meaning to empirical observations.
Only 'science' would say that there is objective meaning in an 'action-in-itself' because that is the foundational assumption of science which delivers 'economy of thought' by ignoring the relational complexity of the physical reality of our actual relational experience. the terrorist actions of Al Qaeda and ISIS are 'ventings' that derive from relational tensions associated with centuries of abuse, humiliation and marginalization of colonized peoples of the middle east, by Euro-American colonizers. How ludicrous to impute objective meaning to a terrorist act;
as Ward Churchill, a spokesman for NA indigenous aboriginals said the very next day after 9/11 (9/11/2001);
" “Looking back, it will seem to future generations inexplicable why Americans were unable on their own, and in time to save themselves, to accept a rule of nature so basic that it could be mouthed by an actor, Lawrence Fishburn, in a movie, The Cotton Club.
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“You’ve got to learn, ” the line went, “that when you push people around, some people push back.”
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As they should. … As they must. … And as they undoubtedly will."
There is no objective meaning in an action-in-itself. There is no such thing as an 'action-in-itself', there is only continuing relational context that each of us experiences differently because of our unique situational inclusion within the transforming relational continuum. Science imposes the simplifying assumption that "the present depends only on the immediate past" so as to 'manufacture' actions in themselves that can be used as 'atoms of objective meaning' to reconstruct the world dynamic from the bottom up [ignoring epigenetic inductive actualizing of the visible 'genetic expression'] so as to avoid the relational complexities inherent in nature; i.e. to deliver 'economy of thought' [Mach].
If women find that having orgasms through sexplay with dogs can be more enjoyable and less complicated than their experience with human males, that is only a problem for those women (and men) who are repulsed by it. It is this sort of repulsion that is projected on the action-in-itself that leads to 'moral panic' and the creation of 'folk devils'. As Stanley Cohen says in his psychological classic on this topic; 'Folk Devils and Moral Panics';
“Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ...”
The laws against sodomy as having objective meaning as an act-in-itself were upheld in US Supreme Court as late as 1986 and only repealed in 2003, where the Court judgement stated;
“The psychological discomfort of repressed or moralistic individuals from centuries before created a jurisprudence relegating the enjoyment of non-procreative physical intimacy to the status of criminality.”
There is no objective meaning in an 'act-in-itself' because there are no 'acts-in-themselves', there is only relational context from which 'acts-in-themselves' are extracted by a double error of grammar which reduces an in-context relational activity to a 'doer-deed-cause-and-effect' [subject-verb-predicate] 'act-in-itself'.
Do the Euro-American colonizers [a reification needed to make a point in noun-and-verb language] want to admit that "their" abuse and marginalizing of colonized indigenous peoples [and antecedent relational-contextual influence] is the root source of a 'terrorizing action', or would they prefer to use science to back them up in imputing 'objective meaning' to the act-in-itself, so that a violent venting of relational tensions that have been long accruing between the colonizers and the colonized can be treated as if it had 'objective meaning' as an 'act-in-itself'.
How many males have engaged in sodomy? How many females have engaged in oral sex with one another? How many girls have allowed/encouraged dogs to lick their vaginas? [there is a natural 'animal' attraction to this practice, and one's private bedroom is a seductive Las Vegas in miniature].
Because some people find these acts repulsive, does this make the acts repulsive? As Nietzsche points out, the act of killing another person can make you celebrated as a courageous hero or demonized as an evil assassin. The general point is that there are no 'acts-in-themselves' and thus it is not possible for an act to have objective meaning in itself. Who knows how many women gave themselves to Bill Cosby regardless of any roughness or drug-giving, as a kind of spin on the roulette wheel to see if they could win intimate insider status with him, and after being cast aside, making use of the public's propensity for imputing 'objective meaning to an act-in-itself', such as giving drugs and alcohol to a woman to lower her inhibitions to having sex.
Only if you believe in 'acts-in-themselves' can you believe that 'acts have objective meaning in themselves'. If the female in a couple into BDSM gives her consent to her male friend for violent non-consensual sock-it-to-me-fuck-fests, it is clear that this context gives meaning that over-rides meaning taken from the 'act-in-itself'.
This is the general case, but it is 'the act' that is visible while the relational context is invisible. This is where 'science' falls short since relational influence is non-local, non-visible and non-material, yet it is in a natural primacy over local, visible, material actions. Forensic science can prove that a man forced non-consensual sex on a woman, but 'science' blinds itself to 'context' and imputes objective meaning to the local, visible, material act, seeing it as 'an act-in-itself' [thanks to the logical device of imposing a notional absolute space and absolute time measuring/reference frame over the 'action' to eclipse the relational context or 'epigenetic influence' that is inductively actualizing the action and reducing the 'genetic expression' to a locally jumpstarted doer-deed action-in-itself].
e.g. the relational context wherein Euro-American colonizers' are continually humiliating and marginalizing 'colonized peoples' so that relational tensions build and 'vent' in violent strife, ... is excised so as to reduce this activity to an 'action-in-itself' by the double error of grammar noted by Nietzsche and by Whorf that reduces relational eruptions to local doer-deed-actions;
"we are compelled in many cases to read into nature fictitious acting-entities simply because our sentence patterns require our verbs, when not imperative, to have substantives before them. We are obliged to say ‘it flashed’ or ‘a light flashed,’ setting up an actor IT, or A LIGHT, to perform what we call an action, FLASH. But the flashing and the light are the same; there is no thing which does something, and no doing. Hopi says only rehpi. Hopi can have verbs without subjects, and this gives to that language power as a logical system for understanding certain aspects of the cosmos. Scientific language, being founded on western Indo-European and not on Hopi, does as we do, sees sometimes actions and forces where there may be only states. For do you not conceive it possible that scientists ... unknowingly project the linguistic patterns of a particular type of language upon the universe, and SEE them there, rendered visible on the very face of nature? A change in language can transform our appreciation of the Cosmos.
In other words, scientific language and scientific thinking reduces relational activity [e.g. relational tensions induced 'pushback' of colonized peoples] to local, jumpstart doer-deed actions-in-themselves. This is where 'terrorists' and 'criminals' come from though these activities are inductively actualized by relational tensions associated with imbalance. The substituting of 'terrorist' or 'criminal' as a local author of a local 'action-in-itself' is impossible in a relational language where context is everything and content is 'appearances'.
paedophilia is like sodomy, given popular meaning as a 'repulsive action-in-itself', which rings the 'moral panic' alarms that bring everyone out in search of 'folk devils', or unsuspecting candidates that can serve as expedient targets for public moral value projection.
overall, the critique of PLW is speculative and 'out of context'.
As Whorf points out, scientists impose semantic structures on the face of 'reality' that are not found in the physical reality of our actual relational experience.
as Bohm says, this leads to 'incoherence' in that the scientific 'semantic realities' we construct and employ as our 'operative reality' don't agree with the physical reality of our actual experience. For example, the logical propositions we formulate such as 'our bomb and drone technologies can eliminate our adversaries residing in the desert many thousands of miles away', can be successfully validated and accomplished. Of course, this sort of science has little to do with the relational complexity in the physically real world of our experience, since such science-designed actions engender unanticipated, unaddressed 'externalities'. The science and technology we use to construct skyscrapers and modern infrastructure, and to launch attacks to eliminate mosquitoes, change regimes, neutralize rogue politicians, ...get impressive successful results. Of course, the requirement 'ceteris paribus' (all other things remaining the same) is nowhere near upheld and the unintended, unaddressed 'externalities' that our scientific interventions engender may overshadow the logical goals that science and technology have successfully accomplished. [e.g. elimination of Saddam, rise of ISIS, elimination of mosquitoes, corruption of relational ecosystems].
Ellul would like us to 'regulate science and technology' so that we are not 'assimilated by it', but he fails to see that it is NOT 'science and technology' that is the problem per se, but the fact that the 'reality' we put ourselves into by thinking scientifically [putting reason into an unnatural primacy over experience-based intuition] is a being-based 'semantic reality' that is radically unlike the physical reality of our actual relational experience.
There are no 'beings' in the physical reality of our actual experience, there are only relations. Saddam's regime is 'complex web of relational activity', not a 'thing-in-itself' and likewise those pesky 'mosquitoes' we may use science and technology to 'eliminate'. We can confirm the elimination of the mosquitoes and Saddam's regime within the same 'semantic reality' we formed and accomplished our scientific and technological plans in, but the 'physical reality of our actual experience' is the complex web of relations we have screwed up in an unanticipated and unaddressed way.
E.g. the internet together with drone technology sucks us in because it gives us an amazing capacity to control what goes on in our common living space, ... NOT! It bewitches our understanding by having us employ as our 'operative reality', a 'being'-based semantic reality. Because science's being-based semantic reality is far simpler than the relationally complex physical space of our actual experience, the practice of science and technology engenders unanticipated, unaddressed 'externalities' [i.e. "science and technology have cured your headache, ... and by the way, given you 125 side effects in the process"].
Ellul's following comments illustrate his view that 'science and technology is out of control' and man must retake charge of it, rather than recognizing that science and technology never did what we credited it with doing since its models and propositions are achieved in an artificial being-based pseudo-semantic reality, which we also use to assess its results and validate its successes. Science and technology are used to construct new things that we want and to eliminate troublesome things that we don't want. The problem is that 'construction' and 'elimination' are 'being-based' concepts that don't exist in the physical world of our relational experience; i.e. in a transforming relational continuum. That's why our constructive and eliminatory interventions engender unanticipated, unaddressed 'externalities' in the physical reality of our actual relational experience. Ellul says;
" The world in which we live becomes increasingly a dream world as the society of the spectacle changes bit by bit into the society of the dream. It does so by the diffusion of spectacles of every kind into which the spectators must integrate themselves, but also by the dream of a science which is plunging us into an unknown and incomprehensible world. This will no longer be the world of machines. In that world we had a Place, we were at home. We were material subjects in a world of material objects. The new world is no longer the familiar world of prodigious electronic equipment. In that world we were in a setting that was astonishing from many standpoints but that was still accessible and could be assimilated.
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What is changing in an incomprehensible way is the very structure of the society in which we find ourselves. This is a direct effect of science. But the average person has no awareness of it, does not know what it is about, cannot understand the change that is taking place, but is aware only of being on the threshold of a great mystery. In our society information is becoming the key to everything. It is more useful to produce and spread good information than material goods. The wealth of a society is measured now by information rather than by products. But all this is very hard to understand and to take in. We are moving into an unknown world, which will be organized in a very different way from that of the past five thousand years. We are moving into a society that will no longer be one of institutions, stable groups, and hierarchies, and in which we all have a clear place. As already explained, we are moving into a society of networks. It is on different points of these networks that we find ourselves situated, belonging to many networks at the same time. But it is very unsettling to be situated in a fluid and apparently unstable world about which we know nothing. It is no longer power that seems to be the primary qualification of science; it is this transition into a world that has nothing in common with anything that has gone before.
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Yet the old social system is not dead. We continue to go through the rites of politics. We live in a bureaucracy. We still have a "normal" pedagogy that needs to be "adapted.” The only trouble is that we do not know to what to adapt. Even specialists cannot understand exactly what this society of networks will consist of. If we are farsighted enough, we know that state structures and national boundaries will disappear. There are already some impressive facts. With the development of techo-science, economic calculations no longer have any value. In science we juggle with billions and the question is not one of profitability. Once a new avenue of scientific research is seen, work must be done in it without any knowledge whether it has the least justification economically. It is typical that artificial economic justification is found later (e.g., for research into the Concorde).
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This ideology of a divine, soteriological science in association with a dream world is reinforced by what we anticipate and by what is about to come seemingly with no human direction and in obedience to none of the existing classical laws. Science is becoming capable both of absolute novelty and also of the regulation of a world, as is only proper for a deity. Like all deities, it has an oracular power. We ourselves can no longer will or decide. We leave this to the beneficent science in which we believe.
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...
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Given the consequences, society, that is, the state, must regulate. It must say what is useful and what is not, and set up a model in the general interest, or society's idea of it. Faced with such a realization and such a warning, we can no longer submit to the incoherent results of science. If we do not judge in advance, once a process starts it will roll on to the end. We ought to have judged before splitting the atom. If we do not judge, the reaction of refusal on the part of the human species that is powerless to know what it is doing, or what it is, will simply take the form of a frenzy against which the progress of a science that is as ignorant of ends as it is efficient in means will furnish increasingly powerful weapons.
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This is incontestably the process. Scientists warn us of it. Alas, others have done so already. We recall Carrel and Rostand earlier. More recently there was Oppenheimer, who specifically refused to continue research leading to the H-bomb. Then in 1974 eleven American scientists issued an appeal inviting their colleagues to declare a moratorium on genetic engineering. But in 1975 150 specialists in California decided to suspend the moratorium. They tried to impose security regulations and limits on genetic experiments, but in this regard no one listened to them, any more than they had done to the famous committees on scientific ethics. Let us entertain no illusions. Scientists will not accept philosophical, theological, or ethical judgments. Science simply leaves by the wayside those scholars who have scruples of conscience. It goes its inexorable way until it produces the final catastrophe."
i have gone back to the book and looked again at what ellul is saying about the [out of control] influence of technology and what we can do about it.
ellul's perspective is one of moral judgement and anthropocentrism, which is very unlike where Nietzsche and Whorf are coming from so, and i don't believe it 'digs deep enough'.
when i cited his view in the words "we need to get to our leash back on it", i should have instead said; 'we need to get a better handle on damage control'. its better to use as many words as one needs to deal with nuanced topics [although this irritates some people] but i am not knocking this approach of having to do back-and-forths to bring forth a nuanced view.
that ellul is using moral judgement and an anthropocentric perspective is evident (no?); e.g. he gives the example of over-population as a bad effect of technique arising from a good effect of technique;
"Technical progress does not know where it is going. This is why it is unpredictable, and why it produces in society a general unpredictability."
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"we recall that one of the serious problems engendered by technique is overpopulation"
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"First, demographic growth is the result of techniques: the prolonging of life, the keeping alive of infants who would "normally" be dead, vaccines, the eliminating of epidemics, and hygiene. Technical progress has brought with it the astonishing proliferation of the human species during this century. The difficulties that have been created are due to so-called good or positive techniques, not negative or aggressive techniques but ones that are designed to serve and protect us. It is this that has produced the impasse, showing how hard it is to distinguish between good techniques and bad."
by comparison, the inquiry of Nietzsche and Whorf (e.g. Nietzsche's inquiry is coming from beyond good and evil, and 'the will to power' applies to the world in general and not simply to humans). i am just pointing out that ellul's inquiry does not get into the influence of language on understanding.
but, by staying at the level moral judgement and anthropocentrism, ellul suggests that what we have to do is to improve the quality of the general public as regards the use of technology, to criticize the 'irresponsibles' (politicians and scientists) who amplify the incidence of 'bad' results from science and technology, and while not being able to 'put the leash of full control' back on technology, to implement a loss-cutting program [see the 'not really' hedge in ellul's following comment];
" Are we then shut up, blocked, and chained by the inevitability of the technical system which is making us march like obedient automatons thanks to its bluff? Yes, we are radically determined. We are caught up continuously in the system if we think even the least little bit that we can master the machinery, prepare for the year 2000, and plan everything. Yet not really, for the system does not stop growing, and thus far we have no examples of growth that does not reach the point of imbalance and rupture. "
ellul's point is that we can cut our losses if we cultivate some responsibility for the 'bad' potentials in technique [e.g. de-throne the 'irresponsibles' in politics and science];
This must be made to cost as little as possible. To achieve that, we must meet two conditions. We must be prepared to reveal the fracture lines and to discover that everything depends on the qualities of individuals. Finally, not really, if we know how little room there is to maneuver and therefore, not by one's high position or by power, but always after the model of development from a source and by the sole aptitude for astonishment, we, profit from the existence of little cracks of freedom, and install in them a trembling freedom which is not attributed to or mediated by machines or politics, but which is truly effective, so that we may truly invent the new thing for which humanity is waiting. "
While ellul's view accepts the causal model of science and technology, it sees the problem in moral terms that technique can generate both good and bad results (healthier people and overpopulation).
Nietzsche and Whorf, on the other hand, see the problem through 'beyond good and evil' lenses. in their view, the semantic reality that 'technique' lives in, is not the physical reality of our actual experience. The problem is, our science and technology as understood and developed in the being-based terms of semantic reality, are applied through interventions into the physical reality of our actual physical relational experience; 'e.g. a technology application may be developed (drone carrying explosives) to eliminate a rogue regime while they gather for a meeting.
But there are no 'beings' such as 'rogue regimes' in the physical reality of our actual relational experience [there are only activities associated with relational networks]. What we say we are doing in 'scientific semantic reality' is nothing like what is going on in the physical reality of our actual relational experience.Putting our belief in being-based (scientific) semantic reality into an unnatural precedence over our experience-based intuition is our problem. ellul might be approaching a similar 'conclusion' by a very different and very messy route [e.g. his analysis is 'binary logical analysis' but full of hedges ("not really"s) and overtly declared self contradictions]
ellul depicts science and technology as a dynamic-in-itself that is assimilating man within it. this is clear from the citation from ellul that i included in my comment.
this is a bizarre allegation akin to an M.C. Escher 'strange loop' drawing of a hand drawing itself; i.e. man creating something (science and technology) with a creative power capable of creating a world greater than man that assimilates man within it. given this delusion, the corollary delusion is to attack the movers and shakers in science, government and business who are unleashing this monster that threatens to gobble us up.
the alternative [Nietzsche, Whorf] makes much more intuitive sense; i.e. the being-based semantic reality we construct with noun-and-verb language-and-grammar and employ as our 'operative reality' [confuse for the world we live in] that we use to 'visualize' the world and our problem-solving engagings within it, ... IS NOT THE REAL PHYSICAL WORLD OF OUR ACTUAL EXPERIENCE.
In the actor-action [being-based] world that we construct from thought and language, we see the builders using science and technology to create a new house in the forest. we do not include in this Euclidian space framed view, the holes left by the extraction of building stones, the stump-filled clearings in the forest where we extracted the wood for the structure, the mines where we extracted ore for the metals we used, and the material we used for the forges and the glass-making etc. that are consumed not only in the construction of the house, but in the construction of the tools/machinery used in the construction of the house.
In the physical reality of our real-world experience, what is going on here is 'relational transformation'. This is NOT an actor-action 'construction' operation as we visualize it in our 'semantic reality'. Our 'interventions' that we view as 'constructive' ("we built a new city on native land/Manhattan island") or 'destructive' ("we eliminated the regime of Saddam Hussein") transform our relations with one another and the habitat. The medium is the message and it is the transforming of the relational space in which we are included.
The confusion is that what we think [in logical thought-space] we are doing with science and technology [e.g. shock and awe elimination of Saddam's regime] is not what we are REALLY PHYSICALLY doing with science and technology. What we are REALLY PHYSICALLY doing is transforming relations with one another and the common relational space we share inclusion in. The actor-action portrayal of our constructive/destructive interventions is a bullshit semantic reality. This semantic reality where we depict ourselves as the people who have God-like creative/destructive power over nature [Genesis 1:28] comes from 'ego'.
"“In its origin language belongs in the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology. We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere it sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a faculty. Today we know that it is only a word.” – Nietzsche, ‘Twilight of the Idols’"
Yes, something unanticipated and unaddressed by our 'will' is happening. Ellul says it is science and technology that we have 'unleashed' that is now taking us over and we need to get our leash back on it. Nietzsche and Whorf are saying that it is the 'being'-based architecture of our language that has us believing that we have the power of jumpstart causal agency 'to create' and to 'destroy' and thus to deny we share inclusion within a world that is given only once, as a transforming relational continuum.
Who here believes that a political regime like Saddam's is a thing-in-itself that we can use science and technology to exterminate? Who here believes that modern infrastructure is 'stuff-in-itself' that we can use science and technology to construct? Western politicians do.
The supporters of politicians empower the deployment of a bogus political 'semantic reality' as a common 'operative reality'. That is the craziness that we are unleashing, 'science and technology' is just a 'passenger virus'. A political movement to put a leash on 'science and technology' is nothing more than a distraction from the real problem that needs addressing; - "the bewitchment of our understanding by language".
short comments get short by 'packing' entire narratives into nouns. As Vygotsky says in 'Thought and Language', the mention of the name of a book, 'Anna Karenina' may convey a lifetime of meaning. Words like 'technology' similarly bring to the reader's mind a huge complex of associations biased to what a particular reader may have gathered from his own unique and particular discursive and physical experience. The person who lived and died prior to personal computers and the internet would have used the word 'technology' many times but would have understood it very differently than a "millennial".
Nouns that refer to groups or people like 'Russia' or 'Bill Cosby' pack within them a complex of associations that can literally 'change overnight'. While the noun refers to a common or familiar entity or activity, the meaning-giving narratives that can be attached to it are many and varied, and though they are varied, the use of 'just the noun' in a comment, greatly reduces the number of words that need be uttered [Derrida's 'indefinitely deferred deconstruction' of différence], as if everyone in a discussion group 'knows what that word means' so that we needn't bother 'unpacking' or 'deconstructing' the everyday, familiar nouns that make our conversations so efficient and our comments, though packed with complex meaning, so short.
'technology' and 'progress' are nouns that bring to the reader's mind a huge complex of associations. Ellul has a whole book full of them, multiple books, in fact, and they are complex associations to be sure. There are many books, so these nouns 'technology' and 'progress' can be unpacked in many different ways, by different people, some of whom have never read a book on either of the topics and are coming from hearsay or their unique personal experience.
if one wants rigorous, 'in-depth' discussion, one becomes an 'academic', but even academics will change their mind on the meaning of 'Russia' from one day to the next.
noun-and-verb Indo-European/scientific languages are appreciated for their distinctive quality of bringing 'certainty' to relational activity that is inherently uncertain. e.g. eruptions of violence associated with relational tensions in the ongoing Euro-American colonizing of the middle east, thanks to noun-and-verb Indo-European/scientific language-and-grammar, can be 'certaintized' by a 'double error of grammar' [Nietzsche], (a) imputing of 'being' to an activity, and (b) imputing jumpstart powers of actions and results to the invented 'being'.
Violence inductively actualized by colonizer-colonized relational tensions can, thanks to this double error of grammar, be RE-presented as violence that jumpstarts from a notional 'thing-in-itself'; e.g.
"Al-Qaida, literally "the database", was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians [in Afghanistan]. -- British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook
By claiming that Al Qaeda is the source of the 9/11 etc. violence, the influence of Euro-American colonizers in fomenting relational tensions is obfuscated. The source of violence deriving from 'relational tensions' is inherently 'uncertain' and cannot be dealt with other than by those parties to the cultivating of relational tensions engaging so as to restore balance and harmony in the interdependent web of relations they share inclusion in.
The coining of a noun to serve as a local thing-in-itself that is fully and solely responsible for its own actions and results, makes the [inherently relational] source of the violence 'certain' and reduces the problem of eliminating such violence to the problem of eliminating the 'thing-in-itself' that is the source of the violence.
This is what Western culture and Western science is all about, reducing relational dynamics to NOTIONAL one-sided causal-agent-thing-in-itself driven dynamics by employing the double error in grammar. Now that we have artificially created a local jumpstart causal agency, we can apply moral judgement as to whether the actions and results are 'good' or 'bad' and either 'reward' or 'punish' the authors [those who double errors of grammar depict as being fully and solely causally responsible]
The archetype for this independent thing-in-itself that jumpstarts its own actions and results is the Western human ego aka the people spoken about in Genesis 1:28, humans, that are depicted as independently-existing beings residing outside of nature and gifted with powers to 'improve nature'.
It is common in these anarchistnews discussions and in general in the Western culture, to use words like 'Al Qaida' to connote, NOT manifestations of relational activity, but 'things-in-themselves' with their own powers of jumpstarting actions and results.
likewise, while it is POSSIBLE to talk about 'technology' as if it were a 'thing-in-itself' with its own powers of causal agency without having a common understanding of what a human is, is it MEANINGFUL?
moral judgement doesn't work. one's experience-based intuition informs us that this is the case, ... it is impossible to get to the root source causal agency in a relational world, the rootsource of causal influence keeps retreating deeper and deeper into the transforming relational continuum, in Derrida-style 'différence'. the most marginalized individuals in the community may push back against the community and slaughter some 'innocents'. no one is fully innocent and therefore no-one is fully guilty. it takes a whole community to raise an angry, marginalized minority. moral judging is nothing other than scapegoating.
Western moral judgement based justice is a failure. It makes more sense to go with indigenous anarchist ethics and move directly to restoring balance and harmony WITHOUT trying to get to the bottom of 'who's to blame'. That doesn't mean that you don't shoot the person who is terrorizing the community, it just means that you are shooting him to restore balance and harmony rather than on the basis of moral judgment and retribution.
Blaming Hitler for WWII is a laundering job to make the rest of the European nations look like innocents even though they marginalized Germans with the harsh judgement on Germany embodied in the Treaty of Versailles. Blaming ISIS for terrorism is another laundering job that obscures the marginalizing of indigenous middle eastern people by Euro-American colonization.
moral judging assumes that one can identify the jumpstart causal agency responsible for an action and result. this is what rational/scientific inquiry promises us and it is bullshit. a moralizing community identifies a scapegoat that can be judged and punished which takes everyone else off the hook.
a world that believes in moral judgement based retribution is a troubled world.
Under the title 'Deviant and Proud', George Monbiot wrote;
"To be at peace with a troubled world: this is not a reasonable aim. It can be achieved only through a disavowal of what surrounds you. To be at peace with yourself within a troubled world: that, by contrast, is an honourable aspiration. This column is for those who feel at odds with life. It calls on you not to be ashamed."
To whom do we protest? We protest to ourselves. It takes a whole community to raise a marginalized minority. We need to know about marginalization and use our awareness of it to energize the restoring of balance and harmony. We may have to 'take down' politicians and regulatory and enforcement 'authorities' in the process, but we do not need to morally judge them, because they, and all of us, are vents that transmit influences from the vast and universal to the point on which our genius can act [Emerson]. If they are holding up the restoring of balance and harmony, they need to cease and desist or be assisted in ceasing and desisting.
I am 'at odds with' a society that is troubled, where people hide behind moral judgement which serves to identify scapegoats as the 'source of bad acts' and punishes them, in the same stroke laundering the community of its/our trouble-sourcing role.
I could accept this moralist society and thus be at peace with a trouble world, but, like monbiot, i prefer to be at peace with myself within a troubled world, and that is the source of my protests of the continuing societal practice of putting rationality and moral judgement into an unnatural primacy over relationality and experience-base intuition.
“How false is the supposition that an action must depend upon what has preceded it in consciousness ! And morality has been measured in the light of this supposition, as also criminality." -- Nietzsche
our pre-Westernized indigenous self is still 'in us' and in this natural mode, there is no such thing as 'purpose' or 'intention', there is only 'rising to the occasion'. the dynamics of nature in general are not 'purposeful' but are animated by inductive actualization. the 4/20 is a call to purposelessness.
Western civilization introduced the concept of purposefulness into its acculturated worldview. if something moved, it was supposedly because something caused it to move, some 'force' inside of it or something outside of it. Western savants could not understand movement in any other way, therefore, since we became literate, our belief is that nothing gets done unless it is made to happen. if we don't go foraging for food, we will die of starvation.
that is the Western view but not the indigenous view.
in the indigenous view, nature beckons us to feed on it, our actions are inductively actualized by epigenetic influence immanent in our common living space.
so, what happened when the Western high priests, equipped with a phonetic language since about 1000 BCE, got together to formulate an official version of 'how the world works'? they declared that man was 'an independent being' who was driven by an internal 'purpose', to 'survive' and right away, everything became 'work' that had to be done 'deliberately' and since all of man's actions were seen as deliberate and purposeful, this allowed the formulation of 'moral laws' based on which of our deliberate and purposeful actions were 'good' and which were 'bad'.
indigenous cultures, and our own indigenous selves, didn't formulate 'laws' because there is no need to conceive of actions as deliberate and purposeful, and therefore there is no way to categorize actions and morally judge them.
epigenetic influence inductively actualizes the dynamics of wildgeese, salmon, reindeer and humans. it is only noun-and-verb grammar that re-casts such movements as deliberate and purposeful. the 4/20 is purposeless. it is like the italian expression dolce far niente;
"Dolce far niente is an Italian phrase for pleasantly doing nothing. An example of dolce far niente is what someone would say to describe that they are laying on a blanket gazing at trees in Florence"
but everything in Western society must be 'for a purpose', so the authorities have decided that 'people want to smoke pot', ... presumably because it makes them feel good or 'get high' or yada yada yada. but in reality, it is to get totally out of that mode of purposefulness.
it is not like a task where one puffs away to get high; "i think i'm starting to get high, how about you?". that is kind of like sex seen in terms of working towards an orgasm: "i think i'm getting close, how about you?" intimacy, on the other hand, is where two people lose themselves in one another, which brings on the orgasm.
dolce far niente is not 'something you do'. it is about liberation from the semantically constructed world of purposefulness.
indigenous intimacy has been co-opted in our Western culture by deliberate, purposeful (for generating pleasure) sex. sex was also legalized in some countries and made into a kind of task where you have 30 minutes to get your rocks off for $50. the merchandise is regularly inspected, as with legalized pot so that you can be assured that it meets some minimum quality standard.
there is a kind of 'short-circuiting' of the real thing when things get 'legalized' and state-controlled. the 4/20 as a liberating dolce far niente isn't the same any more. the mystique and authenticity are driven out of it. it becomes like a navajo doing a rain dance in a local rodeo, proof that, in nature, the dynamics of the inhabitant and the dynamics of the habitat are a non-duality.
Western society misunderstands nature's dynamic wherein things rise to the occasion rather than acting deliberately and purposefully. epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression. the 4/20 and the dolce far niente are inductively actualized by pockets of creative nothingness. they are not deliberately and purposefully enacted.
shadowsmoke's article ably captures a mystique that is in the process of being co-opted. de-criminalization would have been far better than 'legalization'.
i can see what you are saying, but it strikes me as an analytical view of what is going on that conceives of the nation as a 'system-in-itself' whose dynamics are seen as arising from internal 'genetic' influences, such as from the left/liberal influence and the right/conservative influence.
as russell ackoff [systems sciences pioneer] points out, every system is included in a relational suprasystem. e.g. we can do our normal analysis of the workings of a university, explaining its behaviour and its varying health and performance issues on the basis of its internal genetics (departments, faculties, teachers, students, plant etc.), but since the system [university] is included in a relational suprasystem, whose need for it inductively actualized its emergence and continues to inductively actualize its persisting activity, ... a more complete inquiry must ground the analytical inquiry in 'synthetical inquiry'. in other words, if the relational suprasystem undergoes transformation which alters its needs, this will alter the epigenetic influence that has been inductively actualizing, orchestrating and shaping genetic expressions within it such as the 'university' such that the university could increase or decrease in vitality, or even shrivel and decline. It is always possible, using analytical inquiry, to formulate an explanation to problems in the 'university' [seen as a system-in-itself] by way of internal variables.
Thus, as psychologists like Laing, Szasz, Cochrane have pointed out, where so-called 'mentally ill' individuals are under epigenetic stress [from the social dynamics they are situationally included in], it is always possible to formulate an explanation of their illness in terms of internal variables [biochemical imbalances etc.]. Thus, an epigenetic influence [coming from the social-relational dynamic the person/system is included in] that is the root-source of the illness, is obscured by our ability to explain the issues in terms of local internal physical factors within the system. It follows, in medicine, and in psychiatry, that remediation orients to dealing with the 'symptoms' rather than to the source.
It seems to me that your view is analyzing the 'system' of 'the nation' with the 'political left' and 'political right' being internal variables that you are using to explain 'what is going on with the system'.
the 'resurgence' that i was referring to, is inductively actualized by epigenetic influence; i.e. by ongoing transformation in the relational suprasystem (the global dynamic). for example, the flourishing of the British Empire was not driven genetically by internal factors within the British Empire, but more by the accommodating influence of a world ripe for colonizing [as in baseball, high batting averages go into decline, not necessarily because of the decline in the internal genetic forces of the hitters, but because of a decrease in the accommodating receptivity of the 'fielding'].
e.g. the success of US forces against groups like Al Qaeda declined, not because of a decline in the internal factors within the US military but because the US military trained and equipped Al Qaeda fighters to help them kick the Russians out of Afghanistan. One way or another, the 'greatness' of the British Empire went into decline, not from internal factors within the British nation but from epigenetic influence.
a straight-forward 'system analysis can always be formulated in such a manner that it explains the changes in the 'system behaviour' as if they were due to internal 'system' variables such as 'politics of the left' and 'politics of the right', ... such an explanation satisfies the rational mind in the sense of 'cause-and-effect mechanics'. If a person is suffering anxiety attacks, the problem can be modeled by treating the brain as a 'system-in-itself', identifying the problem as biochemical imbalances, and administering drugs to deal with the imbalances, without ever having to remove the person from the epigenetic influences that are inductively actualizing the anxiety attacks [without addressing the root source of the mental illness]. The same is true with modeling 'terrorism' as a system-in-itself; i.e. the genetic expression [symptoms] are dealt with as if their source is coming from internal factors [evil purpose residing within the agents of terrorism], obscuring the epigenetic root-source that is inductively actualizing the genetic expression (terrorist activity); i.e. the colonizer-colonized relational tensions.
ok, excuse me belaboring the 'systems inquiry' details, but my point is that epigenetic influence is always inductively actualizing genetic expression, so that we can never fully understand what is going on in the system we call 'nation' by an analysis of its internal agencies [politics of the left and politics of the right] and what they are up to.
nations were trying to manage themselves as 'independent systems' even though this is, in fact, impossible, since;
"the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants" -- Mach's principle
the colonizers have stirred up the global relational social dynamic so that they are not able to step into the same river twice, because it is no longer the same global relational social dynamic and they are no longer the same colonizers stepping into it.
As businesses globalized [shaking off nations control over business] and banking globalized [shaking off nations control over financing] and as international free trade opened up [relocating the internal essential organs of the nation all over the place and out of the nation's control], while the identity-fixing name of the nation remains the same, it is not the same nation and its fate is inherently bound up in a complex interdependent [ecosystemic] web of relations.
will the ecosystem member we refer to as "China" inflate and bloat as others in the ecosystem shrink and shrivel? will the American Empire go the way of the British Empire and shrink and shrivel? As BBC Documentary producer Adam Curtis has shown in his series of films, The governments of Britain and the US since Reagan and Thatcher have continuously relinquished control of business, finance, and the location of their formerly-internal essential organs, to global controlling influence. Trump and May are sitting in the cockpits of high-flying vessels where they can keep a watch on all the instrument dials, but where the knobs and levers of control have all but been removed.
The cream has been stirred into the coffee. Is renegotiating NAFTA going to unstir the cream? What about transnational banking and transnational business (transnational capitalism)?
how is an individual nation's politics of the left and politics of the right who are trying to gain access to a cockpit stripped of control levers and knobs going to solve anything? As in the case of analytical inquiry into 'systems-in-themselves', the right can blame the left and the left can blame the right, and these explanations out of the context of epigenetic influence will look good on paper and impress people to opt for one political faction or the other, but the only tool in the cockpit that still has working levers and knobs is the military.
Adam Curtis may produce documentaries that show the cockpit of the individual nation stripped of knobs and levers, and showing national politicians, entrusting the nations welfare to the 'invisible hand' of the free-market, getting their cojones snipped off by said invisible hand, but people in general continue to have faith in 'the nation' and its potential for 'greatness', so long as the 'right stuff' [genetic material]; i.e. the white European stock nativists, still have at least a rag-tag presence. It can be done properly again, just like the space-cowboys demonstrated, Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, James Garner, came back and showed the newcomers who had allowed things to decline, how to get things done properly.
the individual nation-state is included in a relational dynamic that is greater than itself. as relational interdependence intensifies thanks to communications and transportation technological 'advances', relational entanglement (stirring of cream into the coffee) becomes increasingly dominant and irreversible. no individual nation is in control of its own future, and nuclear weapons do not deliver 'control' over others except in the sense of murder-suicide.
my view is that analyzing political dynamics within a nation is inherently incomplete in that epigenetic influence is inductively actualizing genetic expression (the dynamics of nations-as-systems-in-themselves).
waves of immigration associated with global relational transformation inductively actualize changes in the internal political factions within the nation. we can formulate explanations in terms of political factions as things-in-themselves, as they vie for access to national cockpits stripped of control knobs and levers, other than those for military actions, but the root source of the changes we see within the nation derive from global relational transformation that is beyond the reach of national politics.
when these waves of immigrants arrive, nativists within nations [who believe themselves to be 'the right stuff' or the key genes of the national organism] sense that the national greatness is stalling, they can use analytical inquiry to formulate an explanation in terms of the internal constituents within the nation. That is how analytical inquiry works, it has no sense of 'epigenetic inductive actualizing influence' as in modern physics and in the systems sciences.
the resurgence of the 'alt-right' is a resurgence of belief in the power of the cockpit of the nation to resolve the problems that are oppressing them, seeing the solution in terms of putting 'their man' into that cockpit. this is the same thing that is going on in Europe with BREXIT and in other national governments. In France, Marine Le Pen is a Trump-like candidate supported from the same analytical point of view. That is, the public believe that the nation-state really is a 'system-in-itself' that is manageable as a 'system in itself' provided that the right sort of management is put in place. This is ridiculous, the nation as a system-in-itself is a gross over-simplification that has never been true, and this assumption has become progressively more absurd although national politicians continue to affirm the public's belief in it.
" “I’ve been a supporter for 30 years,” said a man at the Le Pen rally who would identify himself only as Samuel. “It’s a question of national identity. I grew up in the banlieues,” he said, referring to the suburbs where many housing projects were built in years past to accommodate foreign workers. “I have seen the effects of immigration firsthand.”
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Others think Le Pen represents law and order in a country that has suffered horrific terror attacks since early 2015. “Marine is the only one who will restore security in France,” said Théodora, originally from Romania."
there is no such thing as 'national identity', ... it is blowing in the breeze of continuing relational transformation [system-suprasystem non-duality].
every time things get bad for some population segment within the nation, the nativists among them get back on the kick that their problems will be resolved by putting the right man in the command cockpit of the nation-system-in-itself, even though the cockpit has been stripped of control knobs and levers other than those of the military.
at some point, the wisdom of subsuming policies of local control with policies of mutual support may become too obvious to avoid.
professor rat and many others are supportive of the unnatural primacy of science and rationality.
yes, science and rationality are being called into question by our experience-based intuition, and as nietzsche predicted, are in the throes of collapse, ... not entirely, but collapse from their position of primacy over experience-based intuition. they are, as Emerson noted, a tool that has run away with the workman.
as Aragon has noted in his latest podcast, we have those, as participating in 'The March for Science', who are coming to its defence, as is where professor rat seems to be coming from.
"People who value science have remained silent for far too long in the face of policies that ignore scientific evidence and endanger both human life and the future of our world. New policies threaten to further restrict scientists’ ability to research and communicate their findings. We face a possible future where people not only ignore scientific evidence, but seek to eliminate it entirely. Staying silent is a luxury that we can no longer afford. We must stand together and support science." -- The March for Science
lets face it, 'science and rationality' ARE the problem in the sense that they are being used to formulate 20 pound theories from 10 pound axiomatic assumptions. In this regard, Aragorn refers his audience to the writings of Paul Feyerabend [Feyerabend became famous for his purportedly anarchistic view of science and his rejection of the existence of universal methodological rules].
the physical reality is that we live in a transforming relational continuum wherein the visible forms are relational features. what science does is to reify the figures, giving them names and thus fixed identities and using them in noun-and-verb constructs to construct 'semantic realities' that are nothing like the physical reality of our actual relational experience.
humans are included in the transforming relational continuum, they do not construct it. as the indigenous anarchists have said, 'man is a strand in the [interdependent, relational] web-of-life, he did not create it.
so what's this madness about constructing a 'desired future'? a future 'society' that works the way we want it to work. that is the dream of the Genesis 1:28 man who is the human "BEING" of Western science and rationality who is seen as the jumpstart author of objective actions.
science is useful when it constructs 'less than 10 pound' theories from its 10 pound axiomatic assumptions. see 'chaos theory' for what happens when the theory construction over-reach the simplistic assumptions, like 'independent material being' and 'absolute space and absolute time operating theatre'.
logic is inherently subjective and incomplete. if you think in simplistic cause-effect terms, this is where moral judgement comes in, to say that 'Saddam's regime' is the cause of 'very very bad things' [to paraphrase rationalist-moralist leaders like Trump], so that our logic would have us 'eliminate' the objective causal actions that are responsible for those very, very, bad things.
It is therefore logically consistent to eliminate Saddam's regime. minor problem, Saddam's regime is a relational activity within the transforming relational continuum and the people who are identified as constituting 'Saddam's regime' are merely participants in a relational activity which ultimately includes the colonial powers who contribute to the building of the relational tensions and associated imbalance that manifest in eruptions of violent energy release through such individuals as we label as members of Saddam's regime'. The relational activity is the physical reality that we actually experience, the over-simplistic notion that such activity jumpstarts from 'human BEINGS' is a bullshit simplification and part of the 10 pound axiomatic assumption set employed by science and rationality.
our interventions into the transforming relational continuum based on science and rationality, where we construct 20 pound theories from 10 pound axiomatic assumptions, is the source of continuing dysfunction or, in Bohm's terms, 'incoherence' in the relational social dynamic.
Aragorn's reference to Feyerabend is well taken.
the notion that humans construct society is logical abstraction, useful in the sense of ‘delivering economy of thought’ [Mach] but idealization that has little to do with the physical reality of our actual experience.
in the wake of the boxing day tsunami, grass-roots civil society in thailand and sumatra responded spontaneously to the epigenetic inductive actualizing of regenerative activities, supported by government resources. in the wake of the Katrina disaster in New Orleans, the government sent in the national guard and armed police to ‘manage the recovery’ in a top-down, law-and-order emphasizing approach, straitjacketing the people and putting a lid on their natural, situationally induced actualizing of mutual support, the starting from what is real and experienced.
To be accepting the world as it is, not as it should be, and building something out of the real.
in physical reality, the generation or regeneration of human communities is by ‘relational transformation’, and NOT by the binary logical notions of ‘construction’ and ‘destruction’. solar energy is transformed into vegetable material, and vegetable material is transformed into animal flesh, thus the so-called ‘growth of human population’ is, in physical reality, a process of relational transformation wherein ‘energy’ is in a natural primacy’ over matter within an energy-matter non-duality.
when humans or locusts proliferate in a fertile green valley, vegetable material (and animal material deriving from vegetable material) goes missing. as the slugs grow in the lettuce, holes appear at the same time. in physical reality, there is no ‘growth of human population’; ... that is a logical construct based on the binary notion of ‘being’ which increases by way of ‘creation’ and decreases by way of ‘destruction’, both of these being logical abstractions imposed upon relational features within a transforming relational continuum; i.e. a transforming inhabitant-habitat non-duality.
”the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants” – Mach’s principle
the being-based reality that users of noun-and-verb Indo-european/scientific language and grammar construct with ‘a double error of grammar’ that converts relational activity into ‘doer-deed dynamics’ is a ‘semantic reality’ that is a radical departure from the physical reality of our actual experience. nevertheless, Western culture has adopted being-based semantic reality as the ‘operative reality’ that sources intellectually driven and directed actions based on intellectually contrived pipedreams of a ‘desired future state’. “When we dream together [thanks to the orchestrating influence of politicians] it is reality”.
what is physically real is what we are experiencing right now, where our situational inclusion in the transforming relational continuum is inductively actualizing ‘genetic expression’. “le humain n’est rien, le terrain est tout”, to paraphrase Pasteur and Béchamp, .... as it must be in an inhabitant-habitat non-duality. the fertile terrain is the source of the proliferation of human population. reproduction flourishes where the terrain supports it, and declines where the terrain fails to support it. the desert nomads are attracted to the oasis and its waterholes. the flourishing of plants and animals is not driven out of the interior of the plants and animals, epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression.
we are physically included in a physical world that is given only once, as a transforming relational continuum. we are agents of relational transformation within the One world, not dualist Genesis 1:28 ‘independent beings with free will’, inhabitants notionally separate from the habitat, as Western religious and scientific doctrines would have it.
we are included agents of transformation within the transforming-in-the-now relational continuum, not logical units that pop into being and out of being, as given by the double error of grammar that reduces, by way of thought and language, relational forms-in-the-flow to ‘independent beings that do stuff’.
Who's 20:43?
my point is that if the organizational structure is specified explicitly, then it is not physically real. mountain villages that have persisted for centuries are continually relationally integrating new settlers and newborns and relations are continually transforming in step with deaths and departures, and all the while the community continues to function. that is, there is continuing inflow and unflow so that the persisting community is very much like the whirlpool in the flow of a stream, which does not depend on explicit participants.
in other words, relations are in a natural primacy over things-and-what things do. for example;
“By the principle of Occam’s razor, physicists and philosophers prefer ideas that can explain the same phenomena with the fewest assumptions. In this case you can construct a perfectly valid theory by positing the existence of certain relations without additionally assuming individual things. So proponents of ontic structural realism say we might as well dispense with things and assume that the world is made of [relational-spatial] structures, or nets of relations.” – Meinard Kuhlmann, ‘What is Real’, Scientific American, August 2013
it's just the architecture of our noun-and-verb language that constrains us to descriptions of organization in terms of 'things' and 'what things do'.
in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, there are many different factions; e.g. see List of Armed Groups in Syrian Civil War .
It is expedient to call it 'the Syrian civil war' in our colonizer media, but hardly accurate since many of the groups see themselves as loyal to middle east brotherhoods and NOT to colonizer defined sovereign states.
language allows us to describe organization in explicit terms but that is a mechanical view. it never 'really' works that way. that is just a convenient 'thought-economical' way of describing social dynamics.
in the physical reality of our actual experience, relations are in a natural primacy over 'things' and 'what things do', and a community has no explicit bounds in time or space [every system is included in a relational suprasystem].
so, where you say;
"His worldview is inarticulable because there are only relations [everything is in flux. Since that is the case in Emile-world there is absolutely NO REASON to talk about upper limits OF ANY KIND on ANY HUMAN ORGANIZATION.
This is an obvious and rather glaring problem whenever he does so."
the 'glaring problem' is that the popular convention for articulating organization is to describe it in terms of 'independent (explicit, countable) things' and 'what these things do' which is too constraining to even approach capturing the physical reality of our actual experiencing of organization. How many storm-cells are there in the atmosphere? the number refers to the number of times observers have seen something, rather than to the number of things they have seen.
how many times have we heard our colonizer media make mention of 'the Syrian civil war'? why is there such a blurring of military operations in the middle east region? are the rebels not listening to colonizer media? didn't anyone tell the Pashtuns that the colonial authorities and their media give priority to the authority of the states of Pakistan (28 million Pashtun) and Afghanistan (14 million Pashtun) over the Pashtun tribal brotherhood; e.g. there are rumours that the Pashtuns, who are also big in the Taliban brotherhood, haven't been dutifully observing the boundary between these sovereign states; i.e. the boundary being the Durand line, established in 1896 between Sir Mortimer Durand, a British diplomat and civil servant of the British Raj, and Abdur Rahman Khan, the Afghan Amir, to fix the limit of their respective spheres of influence.
The intellectually articulated organizational structure is just that, an intellectual conceptualization and NOT a real thing.
"“We … should beware lest the intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, be regarded as the basis of the real world.” – Ernst Mach
Describing organization in terms of sovereign state hierarchies is an intellectual language game. as Adam Curtis ['Hypernormalisation', 'Bitter Lake' etc.] notes, states are no longer in charge of organizing financial and business dynamics as these have been globalized and are beyond the control of the state governments. only the state's military forces can be said to be organized by the state.
ok, having observed that intellectual models of organization are simply window dressing superimposed over unknowable relational complexity, ... are we saying that an 'anarchist brotherhood' is going to beat the odds and architect an explicit organizational schema that will actually work the way we say it will, bolo'bolo? Where would the relationship with the land come in, somewhere beneath the anthropocentric concerns?
Once we start including the relations between man and other participants in nature in our concept of 'community', it becomes impossible to constrain the model of an anarchist utopia to terms of people and what people do [everything is relationally interdependent]. e.g. “The goal of bioregionalism is ... to foster an ethics of place and create sustainable human societies in harmony with the natural world, and consistent with the flourishing of all native species.” --Bron Taylor: ‘Bioregionalism: An Ethics of Loyalty to Place”
Conclusion:
'organization', in the physical reality of our actual experience, has little to do with the intellectual models we use to describe organization. 'the machinery of the sovereign state' is an intellectual concept which refers only to the actions of 'humans'. there are no physically real dynamics which apply only to the actions of humans or the actions of states [or bolos]. every system is included in a relational suprasystem.
Intellectual structures such as the governing structures of sovereign states have an implied organizing power that is purely logic-based [logic is inherently subjective and incomplete]. Their organized actions [e.g. war on Iraq to remove the Saddam Hussein regime] deliver successful results [elimination of Saddam's regime] but only in a logical sense. the physically real phenomenon is nothing like the logical operation [e.g induced rise of ISIS].
in regard to; ... "bolo’bolo is also a modest proposal for the new arrangements on the spaceship after the Machine’s disappearance."
... there is no need for 'new arrangements' since 'the planetary machine' is not a physically real thing, but a system of beliefs that influences the behaviours of human believers and others trapped within the belief cult. anarchist utopia will be the world freed from such 'intellectual arrangements' that are seen as necessary to ensure continued organization. [anarchist utopia will be where it is broadly acknowledged that epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression (organization)].
bioregionalism is a relational dynamic that is inherent in nature. it is a basic physical reality that is and always has been operative. superimposed on that, like a patchwork quilt, is 'statism' which forms from political/intellectual beliefs in abstractions such as 'identity' of a state and statism-conditioned people who define themselves as 'members of that state' who are 'loyal to the central authority of the state and its rules and regulations'.
Turtle island was and still is a bioregional complex. the superimposing of statism is an imposing of intellectual belief systems on the human inhabitants of the relational/ecosystemic complex.
the day after a state is declared to exist, the economist can calculate a 'gross national product' for the new state and use the new 'identity' of the state in subject-verb-predicate constructs that impute not only 'independent existence to it' but internal spook-powers of local self-authorship of development and behaviour. this, of course, replicates Enlightenment Europe's concept of the 'human being' an 'independent reason-driven system'.
if a considerable percentage of the people were 'not on board', within the turtle island bioregional complex, and the statist identities of 'the United States' and 'Canada' and 'Mexico' etc. that are being imposed by imperialists with the power to impose it, this considerable fraction might continue to give priority to 'bioregionalism' and lipservice to statism, in spite of having to be sufficiently compliant with the edicts of the superimposed statism and its regulatory authorities and enforcement agencies, to 'stay out of serious trouble'.
in this sense, we could say that 'bioregionalism' is the natural operative and that 'statism' throws a warp in it that is stronger here and weaker there, depending on the region. the outback tends to be less modulated by statist imperatives than those close to centres of statist authority. in the United States and Canada, the farther one goes from Washington and Ottawa, the natural bioregionalism is less strongly warped by statism; e.g. Cascadia.
clearly, it's a battle for 'minds' because statism is intellectual idealization-based while bioregionalism is a naturally arising relational dynamic that is continually operative even through the waxing and waning of different statist impositions (the super-positioning of changing boundaries, definitions and 'identities').
thus, it is a mistake to treat a region where bioregionalism is only very lightly modulated by statism as a candidate for 'having a bioregional identity' rather than a 'statist identity' as many use it in speaking of 'Cascadia', 'Sonora' etc. i.e. both of these bioregional dynamics are operative and the question is whether the statism imposed on them [introduced, originally, by the military force of colonization] can continue its heavy modulation of the relational social dynamics in the region.
in other words, we do not have a binary oppositional situation here in which case it is going to be EITHER statism OR bioregionalism [imagine if the naturally bioregionalism oriented indigenous anarchist population was still strong, in the present era where everyone has come to see indigenous peoples as 'legitimate humans' instead of rodent like pests that Christians can get permissions to exterminate from the Pope and other religious leaders].
Imposing statism was done by Christian Europeans in an era when local indigenous peoples were seen as having no rights because property ownership of all regions was appropriated by statist colonizers in the name of Christian Europe and its superior values.
God Bless us All, they said, withdrawing their swords from the bloodied corpses of indigenous peoples, the latter having mistakenly thought they had the right to live on the lands of their ancestors, and who didn't move their families quickly enough into the designated pens.
Bioregionalism is nature's default. Statism is imposed through political-intellectual brainwashing. The challenge for statism is to sustain the brainwashing hold in even 'outback' regions remote from central authority regions where more people are skeptical of central authority. In the incipient phases of statist colonizing, the brainwashed were brought in by the shipload for settlement within the outback to provide the conduit for statist authority. The statist-imperialist powers were fortunate in this regard, in having a large pool of desperate people (which imperialism had been cultivating) which they could draw from to established a statist presence in the outback of colonized lands. (711 words).
re the word 'libertarian', what is intended?
libertarians support respect for people and property which is kind of like 'speaking with a forked tongue' since imbalance in property ownership leads to the marginalizing of the 'have-nots' by the 'haves'. respecting the property of self and others leads, as imbalance continues, to disrespect for those people who are without property... "sorry to see you and your children starving, right by that barb-wire topped fence that secures vast fields of foodcrops, but we must respect the property of others." every million that the owners have earned has been fairly earned and they have been very kind to their slaves [slave-wage workers].
on the main theme, i agree with you if i understand you correctly. the needed transformation will come through the people.
there is no battle going on between fascists and liberals or whatever name we want to give for non-fascists. that battle was won a long time ago, by the fascists. that's why its more than a bit 'poseur' for antifa to want to shut-up those promoting fascism, ... antifa who are part of this fascist state. no need for antifa to try to shut the barn doors, the horses have already bolted. we live in a fascist society and, being part of it, our means of transforming it comes through our relational engaging within it.
that is, there are no "two opposing factions" except in a logical sense [but not in the physical reality of our actual experience]. the concept of 'democracy' suckers us into thinking in terms of 'majority rule' which makes the transformation task 'political' in the sense that whoever wins over the majority in the battle of political rhetoric will get to install their political theory. But nothing happens until people change their way of relationally engaging with one another and the habitat, and a lot of that change doesn't have to wait on elections or revolutions.
if that is your thrust, i am in agreement. but where you say;
"consider instead the libertarian vs authoritarian aspects in your own activities. It's really no that complicated."
i would say this breakout is not clear because many people assume, for both libertarian and authoritarian aspects in our own activities, that we are 'independent beings' with the 'right to pursue our self-interest driven objectives' and in the latter respect, with the right to own property.
the implicit 'declarations of independent existence' are the root source of fascism. on the other hand, a collective that agrees that 'we are all nexa within an interdependent web of relations', does not have a fascist bone in its body.
but the desire to get rid of the united nations is coming from libertarianism at the granular level of nation-states. this won't work because the assumption of 'independence' is a bogus 'semantic reality' assumption that departs radically from the physical reality of our actual experience of inclusion within a transforming relational continuum. it's not that we need the United Nations or any other bureacracy to act as overseer, ... what we need is an understanding of 'mitakuye oyasin', we are all related, like nexa in a interdependent relational web-of-life, and a corresponding ethic in "our own activities". A coming together of a collection of nations or individuals that operates on the assumption that they are all born independent equals in the eyes of God, is a disaster waiting to happen.
so, where you say;
"consider instead the libertarian vs authoritarian aspects in your own activities. It's really no that complicated."
i would say substitute instead;
"consider instead the relational/intuitive vs being-based logico-rational aspects in your own activities" [i.e. to keep the relational/intuitive in a natural primacy over the being-based, logico-rational].
In the physical reality of our actual experience, there are relational activities. for convenience and economy of expression, we employ 'double errors of grammar' [Nietzsche] to move our heads into a 'logical space' where we treat these symbols as if they were things-in-themselves with their own internal process-driven and directed development and behaviour. this is delusion, but it is a commonly used 'economy of thought' [Mach]. in the physical reality, relations are in a natural precedence over these double-grammar-error based 'things' and the derivative notion, 'what these things do'.
the physical reality of our actual experience includes everything, plants, animals, humans,tsunamis, hurricanes and it is impossible to extract 'humans' from this transforming relational continuum in which they are continually being gathered and regathered.
Semantically, we don't have a problem using terms that refer to a group of humans as if it were possible to extract them from the physical world that is given only once, as a transforming relational continuum. we could use little porcelain figures to signify the people we were talking about and arrange them on a kind of chess board with the 'capitalist class' over on the right and the 'working class' over on the left. but this representation is a logical representation that has little to do with the physical reality of our actual experience.
How about 'Saddam Hussein's regime' [or any 'regime']. the CIA can bake us some porcelain figurines and then the politicians can publish pictures of them and rally the people to the 'elimination' of Saddam's regime. In physical reality, there are webs of relational activity and it makes no sense to treat these figurines as 'independent beings', as in logic based semantic reality, ... but that is a common mistake to do just that because of our habit of reducing relationally complex activity to terms of 'doers' and their 'deeds', using the double error of grammar. What this allows us to do, in our logic-based semantic reality, is to allege that the trouble in Iraq is being jumpstart sourced by Saddam and his regime members.
However as any American Indian will openly share, the source of the troubles in the middle east and in Iraq is colonial oppression. Even the Canadian Prime Minister, Jean Chrétien acknowledged in a nationally televised interview on the first anniversary of 9/11, that the US and colonial powers' (including Canada) continuing humiliation of colonized indigenous peoples were the root source of 9/11.
In other words, in physical reality, things are relationally entangled on a global basis and this physically real situation is way too complex to represent, even if we introduce a bevy of classes and subclasses and bake ourselves a mess of porcelain figures.
These terms like "working class", "capitalist class", "ruling class", "Saddam's regime", are LOGICAL TERMS and logic is inherently subjective and incomplete. Logically, the elimination of Saddam's regime 'makes logical sense', but as long it is just a logical proposition, it is figurative;
"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." -- Einstein
“We … should beware lest the intellectual machinery, employed in the representation of the world on the stage of thought, be regarded as the basis of the real world.” – Ernst Mach
These guys are talking about those porcelain figures on the war board game where everything appears to be very clear and certain, and nothing like the physical reality of our actual experience.
So, we intervene with the logical objective to eliminate the Saddam-regime porcelain figures and we achieve our logical success, 'mission accomplished'. Of course our intervention was not in 'logical space' [that exists only in our mind], we intervened in physical reality, a tangled web of relations [the primary animating source] whose nexa were points of relational confluence that we could symbolize with porcelain figures. Using a logic-based 'semantic reality' as 'operative reality' to direct interventions into a relationally complex physical reality is termed 'incoherence' by David Bohm. It results in unanticipated, unaddressed 'externalities' such as the rise of ISIS.
insofar as 'society' refers to the dynamics of a collection of quote/unquote "independent" human "beings", and fails to address the relational web that associates with inhabitant-habitat non-duality, ... 'society' is a logical concept that does not exist in the physical reality of our actual experience.
Pyotr Kropotkin recognized that ‘relations’ were in a natural precedence over ‘forms’ that evolved out of a matrix or field of mutually supporting relations, and that the natural primacy over relations over ‘things-and-what things do’ meant that evolution is keying to relations rather than ‘things’ and ‘their actions’. In other words, nature’s dynamic is one wherein ‘epigenetic influence is inductively actualizing ‘genetic expression’ in terms of individual forms and “their” development and behaviour. This same symmetry is found in Mach’s principle of inhabitant-habitat [matter-field] non-duality.
That is, this same understanding, that evolution keys to relations while forms are secondary, is ‘physical reality’ in the philosophical investigations of Mach and Lamarck. The relational dynamics of an ecosystem give rise to niche needs that inductively actualize the genesis of ‘niche-filling forms’ whose genesis transforms the relational complex and the niche needs, inductively actualizing the genesis of new niche-filling forms. This is Kropotkin’s view of evolution which matches the views of Mach and Lamarck.
Instead of ‘government’ being responsible for ‘engineering’ answers to community needs by way of an ‘overall authority’ directing the actions of the ‘part[icipant]s’, COMMUNITY _IS_ THE RESOLVING OF NEEDS BY WAY OF INDUCTIVE GENESIS AND ACTUALIZATION OF ‘PART[ICIPANT]S [i.e. the ‘participants’ are secondary to the relational dynamics of community]. There is no ‘altruism’ in nature. Mutual support is epigenetic influence immanent in a transforming relational continuum. As Mach observes;
“In nature… “the individual parts reciprocally determine one another.” – Ernst Mach
Kropotkin’s philosophical view similarly rejects the simple scientific breakdown of community dynamics into ‘subject-causes-result’ semantic structures and sees in its place an overall mutually interdependent relational dynamic;
“The means of production being the collective work of humanity, the product should be the collective property of the race. Individual appropriation is neither just nor serviceable. All belongs to all. All things are for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men have worked in the measure of their strength to produce them, and since it is not possible to evaluate every one's part in the production of the world's wealth.”
While Kropotkin observes that simple subject-verb-predicate structures cannot capture the natural primacy of ‘mutual aid’ over individual forms and their actions, the issue of changing language to accommodate this inverted-from-common-language-usage symmetry is ‘another matter’ [the issue of focus of David Bohm, Benjamin Whorf et al].
The relational symmetries in nature proposed by Mach and Lamarck support the mutual aid views of Kropotkin, such as the following;
From the Siberian tundra, Kropotkin's thinking turned to the political implications of mutual aid. The ants and termites, the birds, the fish and the mammals were cooperating in the absence of any formal organizational structure—that is without any form of "government." The same was true in the peasant villages, where mutual aid abounded, but a centralized government structure was nowhere to be seen.” See 'The Prince of Evolution, Peter Kropotkin'
“It [Anarchism in Nature] seeks the most complete development of individuality combined with the highest development of voluntary association in all its aspects, in all possible degrees, for all imaginable aims; ever changing, ever modified associations which carry in themselves the elements of their durability and constantly assume new forms, which answer best to the multiple aspirations of all.” ― Pyotr Kropotkin, Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal
Modern experiments in the evolution of microbial communities [where generations pass by in human minutes] confirm the bidirectional innovation that Kropotkin refers to;
“It is normally assumed that the recombination of genes generates innovation and that this innovation is then judged as useful or not through natural selection. Genetic information presumably serves as a blueprint that controls the features of organisms and their communities. However, studies of bacterial associations in continuous culture suggest that innovation also flows in the reverse direction, from the structure of the community to the structure of the nucleic acid. In this situation, it may be the structure and architecture of the community that serves the initial blueprint.” — ‘Cultivation of Microbial Consortia and Communities by Douglas E. Caldwell et al, Manual of Environmental Microbiology.
Mach was a philosopher of science whom Einstein credits as having come up with the basic principle from which General Relativity emerges. Einstein says so in writing Mach's obituary in 1916 and in other comments, 1930 and later.
Mach's philosophy of science, in which he notes the shortfalls of Newtonian science due to the imposing of an absolute time and absolute space measurement/reference frame [which enables the notion of 'independent things' that can be broken down into parts like a machine/system-in-itself, by measuring the properties of the thing and its parts and movements relative to the absolute reference frame, rather than 'relative to one another'], ... remains as a philosophy that is not fully captured within General Relativity and which physicists such as Julian Barbour, Carlo Rovelli and others continue to try to 'fully develop' in our current era.
As Schroedinger, Bohm and others have pointed out, our noun-and-verb Indo-European/scientific language-and-grammar uses 'being' as a jumping off point, setting up 'change' as something that happens to 'fixed identity things-in-themselves' ... 'over time'. In relativity, 'relations are all there is'; i.e. there is only a transforming relational continuum and thus; (a) no absolute, fixed-identity things-in-themselves, (b) no such thing as 'time' in a past-present-future sense, only 'earlier and later' in the transforming of the 'world given only once'. This view cannot be explicitly captured in noun-and-verb language since there is nothing in this view with persisting thing-in-itself identity ('being'), there are only relational forms-in-flow [inhabitant-habitat] non-duality.
Those cultures with relational languages can 'talk about this' and we are all experiencing it, but it can't be directly articulated in a noun-and-verb language-and-grammar as used by 'science'.
The problem is that we have built up 'science' with an innate dependence on 'independent, fixed identity things-in-themselves' [e.g. 'atoms'] when our experience is that relational experience is in a natural precedence over our being-based semantic constructions.
Mach's approach to philosophically [critically-historically] investigating the evolution of science pointed out the inappropriateness of building in this overly simplistic, abstract dependence on 'being'. In particular he pointed out that we experience influences within an accelerated reference frame that derive from the acceleration of our reference system frame relative to the suprasystem frame our system is included in. This is a physical reality that we experience and make use of in 'inertial guidance'; e.g. if we are a blindfolded passenger on the back of a motorcycle, we can use the history of accelerations we experience to reconstruct our trajectory within the suprasystem reference frame. Since the Newtonian laws of physics are only valid within an unaccelerated reference frame and since we can feel influences coming from the acceleration of our reference frame relative the relational suprasystem reference frame that we are included in, our actual physical sensory experience is inherently more comprehensive than the explanatory scope of fixed reference frame [being-based] laws of science.
This 'equivalencing' of accelerations of any type, including the accelerations of a gravity field, imply General Relativity, hence Einstein's crediting of Mach with coming up with the philosophical premises of General Relativity. But, commonly, although people know there is a theory called 'General Relativity', they do not make any accommodations for how this might impact their mode of understanding themselves and their relations with one another and the all-including transforming relational continuum.
The problem of 'upgrading' our science-based understanding of physical phenomena boils down to upgrading the mode of understanding of people who are now indoctrinated with 'being'-based science where everything is broken into parts and confusing it for 'reality'. This is like changing the undercarriage of the vehicle we are travelling in while we are using it to move ahead in our understanding of things. That is, we need to take the 'being' out of science' in order to employ a 'being-free' relational mode of understanding.
Einstein, in eulogizing Mach for his work on the philosophical underpinnings of science, which continues to play out, alludes to this problem of having a huge user base that is quite content to continue to work on the old being-based science platform and prefer not to have their considerable investments in simple being-based science and scientific thinking, undermined. In fact, it takes 'great independence of judgement' to avoid having one's mind taken captive by the established assumptions of the historical pioneers, most people are 'bricoleurs' who play around with profound insights and make something practical out of them, the growth of practical applications becoming a kind of economy in itself, that never revisits the foundational assumptions nor does it want to contemplate pulling out the foundations and updating them.
Einstein has compared this to the explorer who struggles through the forest up the slope to the summit and on reaching the summit discovers that he has followed the slope leading up to a foothill while the real mountain is 'over there' so that he must 'backtrack' in order to avoid being constrained in his explorations by having follows a line of investigation that hits the glass ceiling of sub-optimization.
In order to dodge such dead-ends, one must have exceptional 'independence of judgement' so as to hold on to the tension of many different relations that, together, point beyond the foothills of suboptimization. this is recalled by Nietzsche in the context of what we come to regard as 'the truth' is simply what we have become accustomed to calling 'the truth' [there is no absolute truth]; "metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.". That is, in the minds of the pioneers, the initial coinage is backed up by experience and intuition but as bricoleurs that build an 'economy' on top of such findings, we get trapped in the subjectivity and incompleteness of logical propositions [tautologies that say nothing] that keep us making repetitive Sisyphian assaults on a foothills of investigatory suboptimization; e.g. as discussed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ;
How, exactly, does the philosophical habit of mind provide the physicist with such “independence of judgment”? Einstein goes on to explain:
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"Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such an authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens. Thus they come to be stamped as “necessities of thought,” “a priori givens,” etc. The path of scientific advance is often made impassable for a long time through such errors. For that reason, it is by no means an idle game if we become practiced in analyzing the long commonplace concepts and exhibiting those circumstances upon which their justification and usefulness depend, how they have grown up, individually, out of the givens of experience. By this means, their all-too-great authority will be broken. They will be removed if they cannot be properly legitimated, corrected if their correlation with given things be far too superfluous, replaced by others if a new system can be established that we prefer for whatever reason." (Einstein 1916, 102)
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One is not surprised at Einstein's then citing Mach's critical analysis of the Newtonian conception of absolute space as a paradigm of what Mach, himself, termed the “historical-critical” method of philosophical analysis (Einstein 1916, 101, citing Ch. 2, §§ 6–7 of Mach's Mechanik, most likely the third edition, Mach 1897).
The point is that the currency of science is coinage which was originally 'backed up by something', ... we have forgotten what, ... but the currency continues to be 'taken on trust' and supports a continuing 'economy' regardless of it's increasingly suspect 'backing'. the science of 'breaking things down into parts' is currently in that plight and the prospect of overheads in terms of psychological restructuring from the foundations up, rather than our usual practice of adding more knowledge to correct the shortfall, are looming formidably on the horizon.
"The knowledge of many things does not teach understanding" --Heraclitus
[i.e. it just means more notches on one's belt that record the number of trips made up the same foothill of investigatory sub-optimization].
noun-and-verb language with its 'double errors of grammar' is the source of the dualist mind-matter split.
the primary physical reality, 'field', is everywhere at the same time; i.e. it is a transforming relational continuum within which activities are continually gathering and regathering. those activities are given names and language allows us to construct a new, secondary world which attributes dynamics to the relational features that gather within the overall relational suprasystem.
'Science' is the mode of understanding that not only makes use of the simplification of imputing the source of dynamics to lie within the local relational features [systems (e.g. solar system)] that gather within the relationally transforming suprasystem [field which is everywhere at the same time, such as gravity, electromagnetism], but which confuses it for "reality".
Science is a 'pseudo-reality' in which we pretend that 'systems' are 'independently-existing' and reside, operate and interact within a notional "absolute space and absolute time measuring/reference frame that serves as a notional "operating theatre". This bypasses having to consider the relational complexity wherein everything [every relational feature that gathers in the transforming relational field continuum] is influencing the development of everything, as with storm-cells in the atmospheric field-flow.
Purely relational influence is non-local, non-visible and non-material and it is the primary reality. In "indigenous science" which is a layover to modern physics, this nonlocal, non-visible, non-material field of influence is 'the Great Spirit', the spirituality immanent in the universe [the transforming relational continuum]. The local relational features aka 'material bodies' that are continually gathering and being regathered within the primary dynamic; i.e. the transforming relational field-continuum, are 'made of field' or 'made of spirituality/field' just like storm-cells are made of the flowing field they gather within.
This mode of understanding accepts the non-duality of field/spirituality and matter/body, and, as Nietzsche and Whorf and Bohm and others have pointed out, it is by way of a double error of grammar that we mentally construct an "alternative reality" by re-casting the relational features in the flow as 'independently-existing things-in-themselves', giving them 'being' by naming them and giving them, notionally, their own powers of jumpstart cause-and-effect actions that give birth to "SCIENCE", the art of explaining the world dynamic in terms of local material things-in-themselves that live in an absolute space and absolute time measuring/reference frame that serves, mentally/notionally, as an 'operating theatre' for a 'thing-based world dynamic'.
Science then establishes that 'the farmer produces wheat' even though the human we are talking about is included in the transforming relational continuum along with the plants that 'he is raising' [within this semantic snippet there is no mention of the evolution of the solar system within the transforming relational continuum, so it comes off as implying that the farmer is "causally responsible" for the production of wheat, rather than being an agent of transformation, as the plants also are, within the transforming relational continuum].
The farmer's imputed 'jumpstart causal accomplishments' are generally celebrated as 'good acts' [even if the farmer is infusing the environment with roundup and causing degeneration of the soil].
Likewise, there are people in prison to whom we attribute causal responsibility for 'bad acts'; e.g. as discussed at the end of this week's Anews Podcast (episode 9) in the context of 'what do we do with all those in prison when anarchism becomes the operative dynamic?
Science's mode of understanding imputes causal responsibility for acts to notional 'independently-existing material entities (objects, organisms, systems) as if their operating theatre were "an absolute space and absolute measuring/reference frame". That is, science treats as 'real', the relational features in the transforming relational continuum that it gives names to notionally give 'fixed identity' to relational features in the transforming relational continuum.
In indigenous science, which accords with modern physics, there are no 'things-in-themselves' an humans are relational features manifesting in the transforming relational continuum that, as agents of transformation akin to storm-cells, "transmit influences from the vast and universal to the point on which their genius can act" [Emerson, 'The Method of Nature'].
Science, by accepting as 'real' the notion of a human/organism as a local independently-existing system with causal responsibility for its own development and behaviour, provides the rock-solid foundation for Western moral judgement based justice that metes out 'rewards' and 'punishment' for meritorious and reproachful actions.
Just as the relational social dynamic transmits influences through the child-soldier that manifest in his machine-gunning of his fellow villagers, so, also, are relational social influences the real physical source of 'celebrated actions' manifesting through smoking gun-holding 'pillars of society', the 'successful winners' who we credit with jumpstart causal responsibility for their meritorious actions, rather than the relational social dynamics they are uniquely, situationally included in.
Science has adopted this over-simplistic being-based mode of understanding because it is convenient in that it delivers 'economy of thought' [Mach]. Science constructs logic-based semantic realities which are nothing like the physical reality of our actual experience.
Science is the source of rising 'have' and 'have-not' divisions in the world because of its 'double error of grammar' based imputing of causal responsibility to relational forms in the relational flow that it recasts as 'independent beings' that are the purported jumpstart sources of their own cause-effect development and actions [within a notional (mentally contrived) absolute space and absolute time 'operating theatre'].
"Science" thus provides the foundation for the development of class structures within our society through its attributing of 'hard causal responsibility' that supports Western civilization's moral meting out of 'reward' and 'punishment' to those [who science declares to be independent things-in-themselves] 'holding the smoking gun' regardless of their situation within the relational social dynamic, where, as our experience-based intuition informs us, they become vents for transmitting influences from the non-local to the local.
As Nietzsche has pointed out, rationality and morality are a deadly combination when elevated to an unnatural primacy over intuition and balance-and-harmony-cultivating.
i was responding to the dichotomy spoken of by sir einzige and my comment was to map that dichotomy into the field-matter dichotomy which is resolved in modern physics by field-matter non-duality, field-matter duality being an illusion deriving from 'errors in grammar'.
the logical separation of field from matter is the source of the mind-matter split. without this separation, the epigenetic influence of field is inductively actualizing genetic expression [the gathering of local, visible, material forms].
with this separation associated with shifting our mode of understanding to inquiry into local material systems [secondary features in the transforming relational continuum], and seeing our 'self' in this 'independent thing-in-itself' category, we construct an alternative representation of the world wherein we assume that matter and material entities are the primary basis of the world dynamic.
i haven't read Quine but it strikes me that this practice of constructing reality using a material-thing-in-itself based semantic REPRESENTATION, and using it for our 'operative reality' is what Rorty is saying is screwing us up, and that we need to open up to the irony of understanding ourselves as included in what we are taking to be 'out there'. employing a matter-based semantic representation as our operative reality is the dualist split apart of mind and matter.
science employs the matter-based semantic representation as the operative reality and thus splits apart mind and matter. science thus fails to attribute the root source of actions manifesting through the human individual to the epigenetic influences of the transforming relational continuum which are venting through the individual; e.g. the colonizing dynamic is the source of relational tensions that blow off steam through individuals with (a) lower tolerance thresholds, (b) more caught between a rock and a hard place than most. this venting, labelled 'terrorism' [or criminal action etc.] is a local swirl of relational activity within the big supra-swirling of relational activity, however, science, which is the process of RE-PRESENTATION, uses a double error of grammar to (a) impute FIXED IDENTITY BEING [INDEPENDENT THING-IN-ITSELF-NESS] to the local swirl which simplifies our notion of the ANIMATING SOURCE of this activity, and (b) impute God-like powers of jumpstart sourcing of the local swirl, to the 'ghost in the local swirl', created in the first error of grammar (a). So whether we are looking at a storm-cell or a human, science would have us impute to the relational form, a ghostly God-like 'being' hiding within it as implied by subject and verb semantic representations; [Katrina produces high winds; ... Farmer John produces wheat].
In Rorty's terms, the 'irony' is missing in these semantic representations in that there is a loss of the sense of the observer's inclusion in the relational dynamics he is looking out at and reporting on; i.e. he becomes an implied excluded voyeur of the world with a kind of God's-eye view. The mirror view of semantic representation gives us back a material-mechanical view in terms of independent material things-in-themselves that are the full and sole causal responsibles for their own actions, ... no more Emersonian 'vents' that transmit influences from the transforming relational dynamics they are situationally included in; i.e. no more local relational swirls in the transforming relational supra-swirl, ... now only a Matreshka of independent things-in-themselves within independent things-in-themselves, atoms within molecules within cells within organisms within communities within nations with science providing a means of understanding each of these 'things-in-themselves' as local, material systems-in-their-own-right, which can be understood by taking them apart and then taking the parts apart and then taking the parts of the parts apart, and deferring the source indefinitely [Derrida's indefinitely deferred différance].
The intuition that, in our search for meaning, we can follow this scientific trail of drilling down and in through the shrinking granularities of ghost-animating nouns; i.e. from nation to organism to organ to cell to molecule atom, ... and never get to the ultimate animating source, of the nation, ... because, ...in a relational world, "epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression' and the Matreshka structures of science are 'variations in the structure of relational space' rather than being 'physically real things-in-themselves'.
"objective reality" is what enables 3rd party moral judgments without having to consult those directly involved in the actions in question.
in a modern physics based worldview, epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression. this is being rediscovered in biological science via stem-cell research. It conflicts with the Darwinian view which assumes one-sided genetically driven evolution; e.g;
"“As is described by Nijhout, genes are “not self-emergent,” that is genes can not turn themselves on or off. If genes can’t control their own expression, how can they control the behavior of the cell? Nijhout further emphasizes that genes are regulated by “environmental signals.” Consequently, it is the environment that controls gene expression. Rather than endorsing the Primacy of DNA, we must acknowledge the Primacy of the Environment!” —Bruce Lipton, ‘The New Biology’
In other words;
"epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression"
the point here is that space is an energy-charged field that is like the atmospheric flow with its immanent epigenetic influence that inductively actualizes genetic expression. What is deceptive and the source of 'delusion' is that we can see, feel and measure genetic expression and our noun-and-verb language lends itself to capturing dynamics-in-general in terms of 'genetic expression', as if it were 'primary'. But it is not primary. Evolution does not spring forth one-sidedly by way of 'genetic expression', as if in a fixed and empty x.y,z,t measuring/reference frame. Evolution, as in the view of Lamarck, Nietzsche, Emerson, is inductively actualized by epigenetic influence immanent in 'field' that is 'everywhere at the same time'.
Noun-and-verb language-and-grammar facilitates the capture of dynamics in terms of notional 'independently-existing', local, visible, material entities in terms of 'what these independent things do'; i.e. their causal actions and results. All of this is secondary to the epigenetic (outside-inward) influence that is inductively actualizing genetic expression.
In other words, it is 'easier' to give representation to relational dynamics by making a double error of grammar to re-render relational dynamics WITHOUT THE RELATIONS, by tagging a relational form with a fixed identity word-label, and having it inflect a verb to eclipse the physical reality wherein the relational system is a dimple within the relational suprasystem, ... so that the relational system is now depicted as a thing-in-itself that is its own source of development and behaviour [e.g. as we capture 'Katrina' the storm-cell in noun-and-verb language as if it were an independently-existing thing-in-itself with an animating source inside of it, so as to not have to consider the relational complexity wherein the energy-charged space it is included in, inductively actualizes dimples (relational features) within itself.
such 'dimples' or 'swirls' or 'storm-cells' in the relational suprasystem have no intrinsic 'meaning-in-themselves' that is independent of their inhabitant-habitat non-dual context [relations are in an inherent primacy over things].
science has been architected so as to model the world in the one-sided terms of genetic expression, ignoring the natural primacy of epigenetic influence.
while most people who trust in science never bother to question its foundational assumptions, if they were to make the effort, they would find that the approach that breaks things down into one-sided genetic expression does not come from studying the dynamics of nature, but is imposed on science's representations of nature so as to simplify scientific approaches to solving problems. In other words, the 'world' or 'reality' that science uses to model and solve problems is NOT the physical world of our actual experience, ... but a semantically constructed world that is simplified so as to facilitate problem-solving.
The problems that science solves are therefore not the 'real' problems but simplified versions, so that 'success' in solving them, engenders 'externalities' due to the fact that the physical reality is far more complex than the simplified model that is guiding the scientific problem solvers in their remedial initiatives. e.g. problems that are inductively actualized by epigenetic (outside-inward) influence, are solved as if they were inside-outwardly sourced. One's inclusion in a hectic/chaotic relational-social dynamic may induce a headache that science will depict in an inside-outward asserting representation [as if coming from malfunction inside the individual], and seek to resolve the headache without considering its epigenetic inductive origin, ... a problem-solving approach that engenders a diverse multiplicity of 'externalities' or 'side-effects', even as the 'headache' is successfully resolved.
Since no action is taken to move the 'patient' out of the stress-field that is inductively actualizing the headache, the 'successful solution' addresses 'symptoms' rather than 'source' and simply 'de-sensitizes' the individual to the stress fields he/she is included in. The symptom is resolved but not the root source. That is, the sensitivities of the 'miner's canary' can be disabled without addressing the root source [the smoke detector can be disabled without address the root source smoke issue]. In other words, in the scientific approach, the epigenetic inductive actualizing source is left untouched and the problem is addressed by eliminating 'symptoms'.
The analytical inquiry employed by science models physical phenomena in terms of independent systems that can be understood by breaking them down into "their components and processes" and explaining their development and behaviour in the one-sided terms of their internal dynamics, without acknowledging that these inside-outward asserting genetic dynamics are secondary 'appearances' inductively actualized by outside-inward epigenetic influence.
This 'obscuring' of the primary role of epigenetic influence is built into the mathematics of physics; i.e;
“Origin of Mathematical Physics. Let us go further and study more closely the conditions which have assisted the development of mathematical physics. We recognise at the outset the efforts of men of science have always tended to resolve the complex phenomenon given directly by experiment into a very large number of elementary phenomena, and that in three different ways.
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First, with respect to time. Instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past. Thanks to this postulate, instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing down its differential equation; for the laws of Kepler we substitute the law of Newton.
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Next, we try to decompose the phenomena in space. What experiment gives us is a confused aggregate of facts spread over a scene of considerable extent. We must try to deduce the elementary phenomenon, which will still be localised in a very small region of space. — Henri Poincaré, ‘Science and Hypothesis’, Chapter IX, Hypotheses in Physics”
Conclusion:
In the physical reality of our actual experience, epigenetic influence inductively actualizes genetic expression. E.g. as the oppression of the colonizing powers increases, so does the incidence of eruptions of rebellion. These eruptions are analogous to the 'epigenetic excitation of miner's canaries' or the environment-sourced inductive actualizing of smoke detectors and it is possible to seek solutions either by silencing symptoms or by addressing root source.
Western science and Western justice are architected to address symptoms rather than root source. Remediation of the 'rise of eruptions of terrorism' that may appear like a rash on the globally colonized social dynamic can be approached by seeking to eliminate each and every new splotch of terrorist uprising. However, such eliminatory [purificationist] actions may exacerbate the relational tensions that are engendering the rash of terrorist outbreaks.
Science, and mathematical physics, are like 'viewing lenses' that we put on that simplify the world of our sensory observations and experiences, as noted by Poincaré, above, by re-rendering them in the one-sided terms of genetic expression out of the context of epigenetic inductive actualizing influence.
in this forum, as in Western society in general, ... there are powerful social forces that seek to limit inquiry. e.g. both forensic science and the law constrain inquiry to 'just the material facts', and what is intended by 'the facts' is the notion of 'objective truths' as are seen to transpire in small intervals of space and time wherein scientific thinkers assume that 'the present depends only on the immediate past'; e.g. the interval in which a woman pulls a gun and shoots and kills a man. this single act is considered to be something we can nail down as an 'objective truth in itself', an 'incontestable fact'.
In the physical reality of our actual experience, the aphorisms "the straw that broke the camel's back" and poems such as "I sing of Olaf' (there is some shit I will not eat), ... speak of nature's innate 'nonlinear dynamics' termed 'self-organized criticality' where, in the progressive development of phenomena, epigenetic influence builds relational tensions that reach and exceed threshold tolerance levels, at which point there there is a violent release of energy associated with relational reconfiguration in the direction of reducing (breaking out of) oppressive relational tensions. Physically real non-predictable phenomena such as avalanches and earthquakes demonstrate this natural characteristic of the physical reality of our actual experience.
Our experience-based intuition informs us that 'physical reality' can NOT be realistically/meaningfully broken down into local-in-space-and-time, 'factual', 'events-in-themselves', wherein we can assume that 'the present depends only on the immediate past', as is the assumption of Western science and Western laws and courts of justice. Such a convenient, reality-simplifying view proceeds from an EDITORIAL PROCESS that simply limits discussion to material facts aka 'doer-deed actions-in-themselves' and excludes necessarily lengthy discussion and consideration of the epigenetic inductive sourcing of material dynamics. That is, explicit content expressed in terms of material facts (doer-deed actions and effects) can always be 'deconstructed' so as to reveal epigenetic influence that inductively actualizes the local, visible, material fact. e.g. relational tensions in a matrix of sand-grains on the flank of a growing sandpile can create continuing need for tension-lowering reconfigurations (avalanches).
the avalanche is like the revolution. it is the escape from entrapment in intolerable relational tensions. but such tensions can build to intolerable levels again and again so that removing the need for avalanches/revolutions is the needed remediation that goes deeper than 'revolution'; i.e. to the root source.
As Heraclitus pointed out, we can't get rid of strife since it is the fuel of evolution, but we can reduce 'granularity' to the point that tensions can be relieved by the generating of harmonies as in the vibrations of the tensioned strings of the lyre.
Make no mistake, this same inquiry-limiting EDITORIAL PROCESS tends to be operative in forums such as this Anarchistnews forum. Just as a Supreme Court 'Justice' is not going to sit around listening to a deconstruction of an event that goes back through peoples lifetimes into past generations, telling of longstanding abusive conditions that have continued to build relational tensions to levels beyond tolerance thresholds, so is there a tendency in discussion groups to 'stick to the facts' of 'what is happening, or what we want to happen, in the here and now', the 'genetic expression', ... without allowing deconstructions that explore the epigenetic influences that inductively actualize genetic expression.
for example, what lies beneath questions that remain in the #2 "answer' to the question;
“What would we do about violent people who are already in prison”
Answer #2: One of the many frustrating aspects of the judicial system, for me, is the acceptance of the idea that we can't decide what is right or wrong for ourselves; that someone we have no connection to, who knows nothing of us or our situation, is allowed to decide whether or not we have been wronged by another and then make a decision about the fate of that person. Is it so crazy to think that we could empower ourselves to take back that authority in our own lives and communities?
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... the abolition of prisons is far more complicated than the simple destruction of a few walls. We could rid ourselves of prisons tomorrow, but we would find that people would simply replace them. Same goes for police, we could kill all cops, but new cops, even if under a different name, would pop up everywhere As long as there is a need for such institutions, they will continue to exist. We need to change the way we view ourselves, eachother, our communities, our relations, etc. We must rid ourselves of a need for prisons. ...
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...First and foremost we need to empower ourselves, our friends, our communities, to take back that control, to recognize that we don't need the mediation of strangers to decided what is good or bad, right or wrong for us.
the person expressing answer #2, in talking about 'eliminating need' rather than 'eliminating things' (prisons and police) is taking the inquiry beyond 'scientific inquiry' but not beyond physical reality as understood by modern physics. She qualifies her remarks on 'removing need' with; "I apologize if this sounds vague or intangible" and it is vague and intangible relative to scientific standards of explicitness and clarity such as can be confirmed by experiment.
How spooky to think that there is some invisible influence that keeps pulling prisons and police forces into being, even if we are successful in bringing them down.
Our language is very capable of representing material actions and that is the basis of 'laws' which articulate, in clear, unambiguous terms, material actions that are prohibited or allowed.
To say that that explicit factual content is missing the primary understanding [comprehending the need or epigenetic influence that is pulling things into 'existence'], is heresy to Western scientific thinkers. We know how to tear down prisons and decommission police forces, and revolutions/rebellions are always spoken of in those doer-deed action terms, but the erasure of needs, invisible influences that lurk in the shadows and inductively actualize the resurrection of prisons and police, ... that is not what we usually talk about.
Still, discussions of that which is vague and intangible such as epigenetic influence, are not popular in our 'material facts' oriented Western culture.
Oh, this is the transcript of his monologue during the aperitif before the main course of escargot,,,,,
With enemies like Nietzschean's the Patriarchy doesn't need friends
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche%27s_views_on_women
What a fucking dipshit Friedrich Nietzsche was!
masculine fertility offers his constantly-repeated ejaculation while the feminine is innately more discerning/conditional in her reception…the pragmatic (beautiful?) ideale would have the baby to evolving through some harmonic balance or cosmic dynamism in-between them, in negation of material, gender-binary…shall we not strive for poetic awareness in witness to our evolving, special characteristics as sexual actors in the relationship of human-society? or would you have a sterilized sexuality, eliminating emotional subjectivity and instating some anti-Nietzschean, androgynous, polite, Truth ?
While neither are a bad idea, or a necessarily a good idea, any of those are likely to get rid of the load of interpersonal and mental pains derived from ordinary interactions based on sexual attraction, and the drive to fuck. I can see transgender subculture and rituals are as significantly breaking these routines and power plays, though is it to the preference of everyone?
Plus there's also the issue of social institutions, how they'll just keep reifying old binaries until your get... transgedered institutions. Now that we got queer mainstream media figures and teachers, next target will be the ultra-conservative scientific world, and the sports cultures... and the police. So, what then?
Yep. for the hordes of US professors and writers who've been pushing Nietzsche during the 20th century, let's keep giving Stirner the 21th century and drown this patronizing liberal with a ridiculously huge mustache. Stirner had the style too!
Stirner referred to them as " Der behaart laufrad lenker auf der oberlippe " in English, " The hairy bicycle handlebars on the top lip "
The witty innuendo being, that there are handles available to assist in the performance of fellatio,,,,,,,,on another man,,,,,
Seriously though, Nietzsche was an imaginative transcendental poet, his aesthetics have been erroneously translated into philosophical maxims.
Mighty Max was not adverse to the use of useful abstractions in order to facilitate the business of any 'union-of-egoists'. The milk distributors coop he was involved in used spooks like ' money' and 'markets', for example. By extension its easy to imagine a sex-worker looking like Friedrich Nietzsche could possibly make a living as a sex-worker using the Stirnerian approach. I might even pay 20 satoshi to fuck them up the arse, myself.
Stirner frequently commented " Die Zukunft sieht düster der fulle elefant after von ˈNiːtʃəan Liberale durchdrungen ewig bis zum massiv Faschisten schwanz kostenfrei" which in English translates as ---
" The future looks gloomy while the plethora of Nietzschean liberals and their elephant sized anuses are penetrated by the massive fascist penis free of charge"
Stirner: A schoolteacher that liked to drink and debate. Died a loser.
Nietzsche: An academic that liked to eat vegetarian and debate. Died a loser.
Lesson: Egoism is full of people that think they know something, then they die a loser. Also nobody thinks they are much in their own life.
Conclusion: Stirner and Nietzsche are popular because of a bunch of losers learning to be losers so they can die losers.
Yes yes yes! Life is just a GAME you can either lose or win. According to (some priest of capitalism) coz I was so lousy/idiotic to read books. So I spend my life WINNING even if I'm too dumb/ignorant/lacking perspective to understand that I'll never die a billionaire or fuck with anybody I want or become Mick Jagger because that's not how the world works, loser!
But that's got nothing to do with you being an ugly distasteful creep in his twenties who got separated from his family due to being a abusive shitty crackhead who can't help geting in other people's loves coz his is too mierable. No, no... that was not part of the game. Only the rest. Now go back to your daily session of commercial crap music brainwashing and meathead rock.
No wait... i meant "in his fourties".
Maybe that person wasn't talking about winning and losing in the materialist sense... I always got the sense like old Freddy spent a lot of mental energy on building himself up too. Haven't you ever noticed that tendency in the people around you? Less obnoxious once it's written down ... If you're a sucker!
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