September 11, 2013
What the limited nature of our prior experiences dismisses as randomness or disorder, the study of chaos and complexity is revealing as deeper patterns of regularity. Attractors help to identify the dynamics by which complex systems organize themselves.
Thus, it could be said that an earthquake fault line serves as an "attractor" for geologic forces in plate tectonics, just as river systems are attractors for water engaging in its ongoing relations with the forces of gravity.
At a social level, an estate sale can be seen as
an attractor for antique dealers; dumpsites as attractors for abandoned
property; or hospitals as attractors for diseases. In marketplace economics,
the pricing system is an attractor for buyers and sellers seeking to
exchange property claims.
Through this new science, we are discovering -
contrary to Plato's hubristic assumptions - that complex systems
produce behavior that is both determined and yet unpredictable. Left to the
playing out of the forces operating within and upon it, a complex system
will spontaneously generate consequences that are implicit - albeit
unpredictable - within it.
Thus, a business owner who is unable to effectively compete for customers in a free market, may seek to disrupt the order that does not accommodate his whims. He might begin by pursuing voluntary agreements with his competitors to reduce the pace with which they pursue their respective interests, a strategy that is rarely successful.
When the voluntary approach doesn't satisfy all industry members, he and many of his business rivals turn to the state to compel, by force, results unobtainable in the marketplace.
In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against
Competition, 1918-1938, documents this politicization of the
business system.
Despite all of the media hype, government schools conditioning, and other institutional propaganda to paint political systems as noble, morally principled agencies devoted to serving the general welfare, the state is capable of doing no more than this: compelling people - through violence and the threat of violence - to do what they do not choose to do, or to refrain from doing what they do choose to do.
Like the subjugated and exploited proletariat of Animal Farm, increasing numbers of men and women read those opening words to the preamble of the Constitution - "We the People" - and discover the identity of "the people" who control and benefit from the system that was created.
It is almost amusing to see legislators conducting hearings on the problem of bullying in schools:
Or might these solons simply be trying to
eliminate competition, in much the same way that local governments war with
the street-gangs that violently dominate urban neighborhoods, a role to be
monopolized by the state's police system?
But what about state officials whose functions are to enforce some governmental edict or program?
The man or woman who is prepared to initiate an act of punishment to compel obedience to a governmental mandate easily segues into the SWAT team member or police brute or one who tortures another. It is the appetite for ultimate power over others that drives such people.
We have now reached that most vicious end-point
on the continuum, the war system, where the indiscriminate killing of
innocent people - many of them children - becomes justified by the
psychopathic war-lovers on no more compelling ground than that they have the
power to inflict death on a massive scale.
The Nazi psychopaths who ran death camps were matched by the allied officials who bombed such non-military cities as Dresden and Hamburg, and vaporized tens of thousands of civilians along with some U.S. military prisoners of war, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The nuclear bombing of these Japanese cities was done primarily to impress the Soviet Union, while erstwhile beautiful cities such as Dresden were leveled because, in the words of one RAF official,
The RAF Bomber Command chief, Arthur "Bomber" Harris, said, thirty years later, that he would do the same thing again if presented with the same choices.
Such is the
mindset of the psychopath!
If people are not prepared to "lob a few missiles into Syria," Hannity argued, an attack on Iran would be an even better action to take.
His position - and that of so many other neocons - comes down to little more than this:
If you have any doubts as to this, watch the
wonderful anti-war film
Wag the Dog.
...those who are attracted to the exercise of
violence over others can delude themselves to be health-care practitioners
for a system at war with life itself.
This is why Ron Paul was so persona non grata to members of the political elite. He wanted to reduce - perhaps even eliminate - the violent nature of the American nation-state. He was almost booed off the stage at a Republican gathering for suggesting that this country employ the "Golden Rule" as the basis for a foreign policy!
He wanted to minimize that which attracts the
sociopaths and psychopaths to the state: the opportunity to use
ever-increasing levels of destructive violence against their fellow humans.
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