I haven’t written anything for a while. I wanted to watch what was happening especially after the march 15 fiasco. As a student of complex self organizing systems I am amazed at how many things I have said in my many diaries on systems and electoral politics are coming to pass.
Not that it makes me feel good. I would much rather be wrong.
Let me briefly list some of the points I have made and comment on them.
- A stable system only remains stable if it can deal with threats to its stability. The ways it does this are fairly limited. In general it either absorbs the threat and makes it a stabilizing part of the system or it destroys the threat.
Our system is not very stable right now. It has been battered by years of abuse either by administrations like the Bush era or by gridlock and obstruction like that the republicans have done during the Obama administration.
In spite of the fact that it appears to be functioning in some manner, in fact we have been without government for far too long and the lack of action on things like infrastructure, jobs, global warming, etc. are not able to wait.
- The two party system has contributed to the system’s stability and both parties have done so each in their own way.
This is a heavy topic and I’ll only touch on it here. I am a Bernie supporter so you know where I am coming from personally, but my opinions are not just the product of that bias. I stand with a long line of people throughout our history who have made the same claims as Bernie is now.
Elections are far from democratic in our system. We see all sorts of claims of voter suppression and election tampering and are seduced by the trees ignoring the forest. Yet it is the two party system itself that presents the citizen with a preselected choice that they had little to do with. The primaries are an excuse to call the system democratic but we know better.
The situation this year is quite controversial and is so by merely exposing the tip of the iceberg.
- We have always had a significant portion of the population whose loyalty to federal Government is questionable if there at all.
The Civil war was an overt manifestation of this but its end settled less than most believe. The combination of factors in recent years coming from libertarians, Tea Partiers, White supremacists, etc. are but a symptom of a deeper disloyalty. Religious factions are also a big factor here.
- Racism took an extreme turn with the election of president Obama.
I don’t have to elaborate on this.
- The economic myths that seduced people are now all too clearly a scam.
The inequality and brazen greed in the system are so very visible.
There is more, but we are in troubled times and we have few answers if any. The antithesis to systems analysis is the use of conspiracy theory and personality cults. Individuals are assigned superhuman powers rather than viewing the system as a complex whole with myriad loops of causality ind so very many interactions.
I am not a historian but I suspect that Hitler was a product of a system rather than a cause. That is why the Trump phenomenon is so badly understood by so many.
Likewise a guy like Bernie sanders who has been saying basically the same thing for over half a century and is simply echoing what so many of us have been saying for all that time, can not be so much a cause as a result of the system.
We are at a very “interesting” (remember the Chinese curse) point in our history. Everyone has strong opinions about what is happening and what others should do. I submit that no amount of crystal ball gazing is going anywhere no matter what your political credentials are.
One thing is clear. We are fragmented. The recent events are not the cause they are the result of a preexisting condition. It is healthy when diseased processes in our system come to the surface and are made visible. Unfortunately this is never painless and without serious damage. The damage is more or less an expression of the preexisting conditions not the result of the surfacing of previously hidden realities.
What each of us will do will depend on our willingness to step back and look at the situation as a student of the process rather than one who has had answers all along. This is an extremely important challenge and our future depends on it very much.
I have no answers. I am an existentialist and I am taking this one day at a time. As student of systems theory I have to be that way. The human mind has severe limits and it tries to overcome those limits by coming up with answers to questions that are too complex for it.
I’ll leave you with these thoughts knowing from what has happened in the past that few will be willing to see it as I have described.