Why do we we spend so much time, resources, and personal energy in fighting with "the other side"? I live with people and interact with them every day. They could be classified as Tea Baggers or their sympathizers. They will sit by and watch or support as the police use force against people fighting for them every day. They think government has been a bad thing and they are far from totally wrong even though their analysis comes from the people who oppress us all. In Tunisia and Egypt the people seemed to not be split this way. In Libya and Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan they seem to be split in their own way. Certainly in Palestine the case is clear. I have subscribed to the thesis that many have that where ever Britain was a Colonial power they left division as a stepping stone to Neocolonialism. The ability of oppressive forces to divide and conquer and subjugate is myriad throughout history. Doesn't it make you wonder? Why are the Tea Baggers part of the 99% and yet have not stood with OWS? Why have poor people been sucked into racism rather than siding with the people their masters sic them on? This is too wide spread a phenomenon worldwide and throughout history to simply shrug off as some misconceived "human nature". I submit to you that we are evolving in our thought and we are evolving in our models of our world but are very naive and primitive with respect to the systms nature of our existence and our problems. Our very cherished and touted form of government was put together long before the modern impact of communications, technology, globalism, and related advances could even have been imagined but we seem to have a blind faith that they were so omniscient that their creation can adapt to anything. Sorry folks, but I can't see a shred of evidence for that. We live in a Nation that indulges in the advances of science and technology and at the same time rejects science as a credible way to understand our as we run like lemmings to the cliff's edge How is this to be explained? I have a way and if you read on I will share part of it with you.
Jim Coffman and I are writing a book as a result of my last published paper. It's title is Global Insanity and it deals with a large part of this issue. What it was motivated by was my last published work:Even More Than Life Itself: Beyond Complexity. Axiomathes 21 (3):455-471.. The series I am contributing here will probably end up as another book (assuming I'll live that long). The issues we face in today's political sphere are so deeply rooted in an archaic world view that goes back hundreds of years. The right and the left are both victims of this but in different ways and to different extents.
Let me make what I am doing as clear as I can. I have published books and about a hundred refereed papers in scientific journals and know that game very well. We are in a crisis now and there is no time to play that game anymore. What is needed is action but very careful action arising out of an understanding of how we got to be in this awful predicament in the first place. Our forthcoming book will deal with that in some detail but I want to focus on the political side of it here. The issue, as I stated, is why we can be divided against ourselves so effectively as to make us do the bidding of our masters? And be clear...by us I mean all of us, democrats and republicans, right and left. This is where a systems view of the problem is the only way to break out of the mindset. For if you can be an alien from a distant planet for a moment and observe us as a system you will see something very different than what you normally see. You will see people fighting each other who have been abused, exploited, mistreated, etc. by others who sit by and watch and are amused at their cleverness. Men vs women, blacks vs whites, immigrants vs earlier immigrants, right vs left and so on. We have some sort of natural tendency to easily be induced with fear of others and of letting that fear consume us. The explanation for this is difficult to come by because we also have a world view that is very archaic and very prone to having us see trees rather than forest. This is not a hard thing to understand for Western Culture if you look back in history. Descartes sold out to the Church with two important concepts that are the basis for how our present world views are constructed no matter which side of these artificial divisions we are on. These Cartesian fallacies are the mind-body duality and the machine metaphor. Together they are the basis of the 18th century enlightenment thinking that we hold so dear. George Lakoff has already said much about this and I use his ideas in what I have constructed. He has missed some of this but he has seem much of it in his way.
Lakoff wrote many books that have the potential for liberating us from some of the Cartesian trap but what my colleagues and I have learned from the many books by Robert Rosen supplies a lot that is missing in Lakoff's analysis as good as it is.
Let me cut to the quick here and then elaborate in the next installment. It is so evident once you think about it. The comparmentalisation of knowledge and information is our dominant mode. Our educational system, our politics, our news media, our whole world view is based on breaking the vital interconnections that exist in the system that is our real world in order to construct "simple" models to "facilitate understanding". This is what we learn in school, this is the basis for the technology that we worship, and it is the reason we have an incomplete approach to healthy living, among other things.
Is it no wonder that we miss the forest for the trees. is it no wonder that we use the 99% vs 1% meme and still miss the point? Only when we see the system as the alien from another planet can will we understand what we are up against. The system's view is the revolution we are seeking. Can we step out of our mental prison and see it? I think so or I would not be writing this series. let me know what you think so far.