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<body> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">EARTHBOUND ESSAYS</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="4">Views from a Mountaintop</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">by Hugh M. Lewis</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">1992</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font face="Bookman Old Style" size="3"><sup>Copyright © 2001 by Hugh M. Lewis<br> </sup></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font face="Bookman Old Style" size="3"><sup>(Portions of this text may be printed and copied for personal use in research or education, and for use in the class-room only)</sup></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> This is another</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">E-publication by</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a HREF="http://www.omniprise.net/Publishing.htm">Lewis Micro-Publishing</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">For further information regarding Lewis Publishing</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Please contact:</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> <a HREF="mailto:lewismicropublishing@lewismicropublishing.com">Lewis Publications</a></p> <hr> <p ALIGN="left"><font size="5">Earthbound Essays Contents</font></p> <p ALIGN="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/EarthboundEssays/EarthboundEssaysPreface.htm" target="main">PREFACE</a></p> <p align="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/EarthboundEssays/EarthboundEssays1.htm" target="main">I. EARTHBOUNDNESS</a></p> <p align="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/EarthboundEssays/EarthboundEssays2.htm" target="main">II. PAN HUMANNESS</a></p> <p align="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/EarthboundEssays/EarthboundEssays3.htm" target="main">III. PARADIGMS AND POWER</a></p> <p align="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/EarthboundEssays/EarthboundEssays4.htm" target="main">IV. MIND AND MYTH</a></p> <p align="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/EarthboundEssays/EarthboundEssays5.htm" target="main">V. BEINGNESS AND NONBEING</a></p> <p align="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/EarthboundEssays/EarthboundEssays6.htm" target="main">VI. CULTURE HISTORY</a></p> <p align="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/EarthboundEssays/EarthboundEssays7.htm" target="main">VII. DIALECTICAL SYMBOLISM</a></p> <p align="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/EarthboundEssays/EarthboundEssays8.htm" target="main">VIII. SCIENCE AND SENSE</a></p> <p align="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/EarthboundEssays/EarthboundEssays9.htm" target="main">IX. EVOLUTION AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT</a></p> <p ALIGN="left"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/EarthboundEssays/EarthboundEssays10.htm" target="main">X. PHILOSOPHOS AND PHILOLOGOS</a></p> <hr> <p align="center"><b><font size="5">PREFACE</font></b></p> <p align="center"><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></font></b></p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="left">These essays were written about a decade ago, and this is the first and probably only form of their publication. I have explored the essay form periodically in my private career as a writer over the last twenty years. Perhaps it comes with the territory of Academic Anthropology that I have managed to mark out for myself over this span of time. </p> <p align="left">The essay form is now a largely neglected genre that has taken a peculiar place of importance in the history of English literature. It is most commonly found today in encyclopedias, academic textbooks, student reports and journals. I have found it to be an especially suitable form for the expression and exploration of basic ideas and concepts that otherwise are either difficult to clarify in juxtaposition with competing ideas or else lack the appropriate context their elucidation and elaboration when broached in other, more elaborate textual frameworks.</p> <p align="left">I believe that the traditional and neo-classical role of the essay in English literature has been largely usurped by the prevalence of journalism and newspaper articles that have a fundamentally different style and function than that of the formal essay. The conventional structure of the essay puts as a premium, as inherent to its form, a certain expressive parsimony and efficacy that is lacking in any other literary context. Thus, if a clear and simple style of English is sought, a kind of elementary Strunk and White, then the essay in its simplest and most stereotypical form would be preferred over almost any other kind of framework. But concision of expressive style is not all that an essay is about. The beauty of Bacon's essays are as much in their unity and style of expression as they are in any prosaic formalism. If these essays were one word less or more or one sentence or phrase lacking, then they would fall short of the standard that they have set for all good essay writing in English.</p> <p align="left">Most in our day and age would find the conventional essay boring stuff compared to the television or the Internet. We live in an age of McLuhan where the medium is both the massage and the message. The effect of the communication often does not extend beyond the moment of its mechanical transmission. In approaching the essay form it must be understood that form and function are intertwined and interdependent, but that both are conceptually dependent upon the ideas and range of experience they are bound within. If they are sublime and profound, then they will come to us like a bottle of musty old wine, or a good piece of poetry that is meant to be read, reread, and savored for all the nuances to be found within. Indeed, an essay that transcends its own mannerism and style of expression becomes a disembodied and unpetrified text that generates new meanings and accumulates meanings with each passing moment.</p> <p align="left">The essays contained in these pages are a departure from the hierarchical outline formalism of such writing that is taught in elementary school or that is found still in encyclopedias. I have taken an unconventional tack in essay writing with the purpose of exploring the structure and forms to which essays may be effectively put. Some of the essays are long, and others are short essays, intended to be only one or two pages in length at most.</p> <p align="left">The essays within this work are eclectic, but they have been unified in a framework that I would call "meta-thematic." There are ten meta-themes under which these essays have been grouped, and these meta-themes make these essays somewhat philosophical in orientation. I would define a meta-theme as a larger, more general frame of reference within which a variety of diverse topics can be grouped in service of a deeper philosophical understanding of the basic truths each relates to.</p> <p align="left">In hindsight, I would say that in my philosophy I have managed to blend a form of Eastern Buddhist-Taoist perspective with a traditional American Transcendentalism. I find the notion of earthboundness as adequate and sufficient for a wider range of conventional philosophical topics, from metaphysics to aesthetics and ethics. Earthboundness is a concept that has perhaps greater relevance in the present day than at anytime in our collective history.</p> <p align="left">I have been mostly a strong empiricist, and for much of my adult life had rejected any form of Platonic or continental rationalism. I have only recently returned to the fold of rationalism, especially in terms of scientific theory and metaphysics, upon the realization that empiricism alone is blind and insufficient to a complete understanding of reality and knowledge.</p> <p align="left">If one is to write and do philosophy in a creative and interesting manner, then I would suggest that one must eventually come to the essay as the most adequate framework for the expression of many of the most important and fundamental ideas to be found in philosophical inquiry. This comes with only one caveat. Though an essay can stand upon its own, as least hypothetically, an essay achieves its greatest strength when bound into a larger collection of thematically grouped essays.</p> <p align="left">Though I have periodically explored the essay form in my writing throughout my anonymous career as a writer, this work represents the greatest and most intensive effort in exploration of the essay form I have yet undertaken. Subsequently I undertook several works in essay writing relating especially to topics in anthropological knowledge, but these were focus upon things anthropological and largely esoteric in relation to the everyday experience of most people. </p> <p align="left">Essays blend naturally to a larger textual structure that I would call the article that are more conventionally and commonly found, especially in Academia and academic textbooks. The article is fundamentally different from the essay in addressing thematic issues that appear at least upon the surface of things to be more complex. Thus the focus of an article is more functionally distributed in the exploration or explanation of structures of knowledge within a thematically defined framework, whereas in an essay the focus comes to rest upon a single topic that can be said to contain its own framework in a meta-logical manner. Thus the voice and style of the essay may often come to mechanically embody the topic of the essay in a way that is more difficult to achieve in a longer and more elaborated article. I would claim that though the topic of a short essay might not appear as complex on the surface compared to the thematic structure of an article, an effective essay in general tends to be a much deeper and more profound exploration of basic concepts.</p> <p align="left">Another neglected form related to the essay is the more personal style of letter and note writing that harks back to a much earlier era in which an epistle had its own purpose and penmanship. Letter writing tends to deal with a more personal and subjective side of experience compared to the essay. Letters thus are inherently concrete in their discussion of feelings and thoughts, in the description of events and experiences, or in the recording of facts and figures. Letters, when they are published as collections, constitute their own literary form with their own distinct qualities. They are related to essays, but serve different purposes than the essay that is meant to inform and persuade, expound and critique on divers topics.</p> <p align="left">But the essay as a form and conventional style in and of itself has survived the ravages of changing media technologies and fashions, and remains today an important element of expression and thought in English literature regardless of how few writers may actually employ it any longer.</p> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER">PART 1</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">EARTHBOUNDEDNESS</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></font></b></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Early European explorers did not have a good conception of the earth as a single spherical entity. The whole earth remained an abstraction found only on world maps and scale models of the globe. It was not until Humankind actually escaped the gravitational pull of the earth and had the actual vision of the earth as a solitary planet in a vast and empty space that its wholeness and roundness began to have special significance for us. Before then, our vision of the earth was largely circumscribed by our seemingly boundless local horizons and we lived under the spell of its illusion of vastness and virtual unlimitedness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Enlightenment of the earth as a global whole did not suddenly burst into our imaginations like a sunrise. It emerged gradually, embryonically and quite unapperceptively . but now it has coalesced into its finished shape and we can see it and ourselves in relation to it more clearly and we can no longer readily ignore it. The earth is round and its horizons close upon themselves, is space is bounded in all directions, and its many resources finite in amount. The vision of its wholeness present us with a new sense of environment, one that is global in perspective, which our old metaphors, our old sensibilities and conceptions, and our old sensitivities hardly equip us to fully see. And we share an important psycho-geographical relationship to this new sense of environment--our personal and collective identities, our sense of experiential continuity and existential security, is tied to our ability to envision and relate to it as a planetary abode, as our earth home. But this new sense of environment is irreducibly wholistic, pristine, primordial ecology of the natural earth, and has replaced it by an artificial ecology of a scientifically organized humankind. What remains of the earth's environment is the composite result of world wide interactions between civilization and natural processes--a curious cyborgian mosaic of synthetic and natural elements. Nature has become bound by our civilization and our civilization has become bound by nature, and we cannot now return to a natural ecology without doing undue harm to both ourselves and our natural environments. The new kind of earthbound equilibrium which we need to establish is a conservative one in which the benefits of civilized development have to be weighed against the unaffordable costs to our remaining nature, such that the safety margins of both may be protected and preserved.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We have always had other choices than those provided for us by the world system--our collective failure has in part due to our individual failure to recognize such alternative choices and to realize the changes such choices would entail in our lives. Failure to make such choices has led to choices being made for us by the great and impersonal forces of the world system.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Earthboundedness is a whole earth state of mind which regards the entire earth as a single, solitary home for humankind; vast in area but not unlimited; bountiful in raw resources but definitely circumscribed in all ways. Earthboundedness also regards our only home planet as a single, natural, well integrated orgasmic entity, enduring in its complexities but not impervious to the depredations of civilized development.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But earthboundedness is more than this--it represents a whole world view of a new earth environment, a philosophy and a new way by the earth's boundaries, replete with all the many implications and significances which living upon an inescapable island in space holds for humankind, human culture, history, science, values and the ethos of everyday existence.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Earthboundedness is not a natural state, but a human state of being bound in all thoughts and actions by the dimensionalities and proportionalities of the entire Earth. Earthboundedness has begun seeping into our everyday lives, influencing everything we say and do in contextual and unconscious ways, informing our words and deeds with a new level of importance and sense of order. Bringing the state of being earthbound to a heightened level of consciousness, 'earthbound enlightenment' in both the individual and collective mind is a way of dealing now with the new predicament and paradoxes which confront humankind in the third millennium after Christ, and its elaboration provides the common conceptual ground for cultivating a universal sense of human identity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">As a word, 'earthboundedness' means several different things. Most literally, it means the state of being bound by the earth--environmentally circumscribed by the earth's gravitational field. We always soon know when our feet are not firmly planted on the ground. Metaphorically, earthboundedness provides the principle horizon of the human mind which like the anthropological conception of 'culture boundedness' in one's values, world view, attitudes, behavior, knowledge, perception and experience, such that one cannot escape one's own cultural orientation in order to assimilate or appreciate any other, makes its difficult to adopt any other kind of comprehension about the world. It is a 'geo-physically' orienting consciousness around a geo-physically limited and meta-physically limiting set of environmental constraints--pervading every instance of our collective experience, invading everyday of our personal existence, and predetermining our capacity to adaptively cope with and adapt to new environmental changes. A transition between world view, trading off one kind of 'total' world view for another, and in the process transcending the limitations of 'total world view' altogether. Finally the meta-physical sense of earthboundedness consists of the many states of mind and being which are informed by the awareness, however remote, of being earthbound in all ways. There has been an awakening of awareness of the collective condition of being earthbound, but there has not yet been self recognition of 'earthboundedness' as a collective frame of mind, nor any systematic exploration of its possible implications for humankind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Earthboundedness as a way of relating to our world concerns principally the human ecology of being on earth, rather than the natural ecology of the earth's environment. It is concerned with human adaptation. Unlike 'earth-mindedness' it is not primarily aimed at the relationship to the environment of the earth, so much as the human mind and state of being which is environmentally open and which allows for relationship with the natural environment. The primary problems challenging humankind today are environmental in symptoms, but the causes are rooted in human factors and human causes which eventuate in environmental destruction and in turn exacerbate the human factors and causes. Earthboundedness is also not about the anthropological condition of modern humankind, so much as it is about the philosophical, normative, historical and psychological aspects of the modern human condition in its maladaptation to the earth environment. Earthboundedness is a way of finding ourselves in our environment.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">'Earthbound' can be used adjectivally in a number of related ways. For instance:</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">'Earthbound Epoch'. Culture historically we are entering an 'earthbound' age in which earthboundedness, as the basis of human reality, identify and humanity, is becoming the predominant theme around which humankind is organizing itself.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">'Earthbound Civilization'. The process of an emerging earth centered way of life which shares a common earth history and a common sense of human identity rooted to the earth.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">'Earthbound Environments'. We live and act within local, regional and global scales of context which are 'complete' environments in their circumscription of our world and our lives, composed of numerous webs and interlocking networks in which everything is related to everything else, however indirectly and remotely. We are enmeshed inextricably in many webs of interdependency which overlap and extend in every direction around the entire earth. We are locked into long chains of interaction the other end of which we rarely see or know about.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">'Earthbound Ecology'. There is only one complete ecology, the earthbound one, in which we find ourselves part of an important natural processes of self organization, cyclical patternings of change, chaos and anti-chaos, and in which there are no separate or independent or self determining entities apart from this natural ordering process.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">'Earthbound Synergy'. The many parts have come to cohere jointly in many different patterns to make up the framework of the synergistic whole, and the wholeness becomes manifest in the patternings and processes of its many parts.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">'Earthbound Indirection and Delay'. The former guaranteeing us that whatever the immediate direct consequences of our local behaviors, there will always be indirect 'damage' or 'avalanches' in regions of the earth which may be quite remote from our own. While the latter guarantees us that there will be some unpredictable delay in the total effects of long term consequences.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">'Earthbound Existence'. Earthboundedness has come to pervade every aspect of our day to day lives, and all our actions have some cumulative consequences upon many other parts and eventually upon the whole. It is the global framework orienting all regional and local actions and considerations. The web are becoming more entangling, the chains of interdependency stronger and longer. We need to know how earthboundedness intrudes upon the many parts of our daily lives.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">'Earthbound Imperative'. Earthboundedness imposes a kind of existential imperative in our lives--the need to know and to act. Global circulatory and environmental circumscription superimpose a grand Malthusian dilemma which entails that we learn how to see and adapt to new global environments in ways which lead to health instead of disease.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">'Earthbound Karma and Dharma'. Whatever indirect damage we do, its consequences must eventually, however indirectly, rebound back to affect us in some way in our local situations--if not during our lifetime, then during our children's lives. Nature will always lay upon our doorstep the ills wrought by the errors of our ways until we mend our mistakes and repair the damages.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">'Earthbound Ethos and Ethics'. Our earthbound imperative demands that we adopt new styles of living and ways of being, and that we learn and teach to our behavior which confer the rational and moral legitimacy to lead our lives in new directions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is only one ecology, our own earthbound ecology, and it is composed of the planetary fabric of life--we are but parts of the whole, and all other environments or ecologies are but eco-niches of the earthbound one. It remains in a perennial state of super criticality, at the edge of entropy and complete chaos. We can no longer dump wastes into streams or sewers, or raze forests or habitats without affect in some measure of all other parts of the whole. We must understand a new earthbound 'ecology of mind' which reflects our awareness and responses to our environments. We are at the dawning of 'earthbound enlightenment' in which our earthbound ecology of mind is coming into environmental self awareness, providing us with a new macroscopic perspective of a natural humankind on earth. We are confronted with a new point of view, an 'earthbound perspective' with its own unprecedented complexity, completeness, comprehensivity, multidimensionality, encompassing and encapsulating all other viewpoints and defining for us our collective baseline and bottom line. Earthboundedness is demanding of us new kinds of adjustments and accommodation with which we've had little previous experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is within the framework of earthboundedness that we must come to terms with the most pressing problems of our era. These are primarily human problems, and only secondarily environmental ones, except the human problems are ones of environment as well. The human element is the cause, of the environmental challenges we are now facing, problems which rebound in turn and aggravate our human predicament. The predicaments imposing our earthbound imperative are interrelated like the global ecology in which they are situated--one set of problems cannot be understood without accounting for all the other problems in the field of relations. Similarly problems are processual and patterned, bound within complete contexts of interrelation lacking many delimiting boundaries.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">1. The first and most important problem is overpopulation. Natural population increase has always driven many processes of state formation, warfare, environmental circumscription, migration and other religious practices and social customs. Environmental circumscription is directly related to population pressure. Population increase is in equilibrium with environmental adaptation--there is a feedback process such that adaptive success begets population increase and population increase drives environmental adaptation. The problem is one of local and global overpopulation. There is enough food worldwide to adequately feed all five billion people upon our planet--it is the uneven distribution of the surplus which results in mass starvation and pandemic malnutrition in many regions. The kind of malnutrition that is the consequence of overpopulation is 'protein calorie malnutrition'--the insufficiency of essential amino acids and minimal levels of energy which increases susceptibility to disease, lowers productivity and empowers many 'population control mechanisms'. It has been the rapid rate of increase spurred by development and uncurbed by sufficient birth control and family planning practices, which threaten to carry the global population to overload the carrying capacity of the earth within one or two more generations. Inspite many educated guesstimates, we have no firm idea of the 'carrying capacity' of the earth. Scientific advances in the hybrid grains, breeding and agriculture may increase this capacity in indefinite ways, and the human capacity to tolerate and live with less remains quantitatively incalculable. The human world will only continue rapidly shrinking in relation to the increasing demand for land, resources, food and spaces for living, to the point that much of the globe will soon become essentially a very dirty, overcrowded little slum which most people will still cal their homeland.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Most of the social disease related to slum dwelling will also be pandemic--problems of mass poverty, underemployment, lack of social mobility, increasing food prices. The quality of life will deflate in proportion to the increase in the quantity of life and the human population will quickly outstrip our system's capacity to adequately and evenly meet the demands and basic requirements of earthbound existence--scientific technology will not produce enough technical solutions to go around, except for the final solution.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The problem of overpopulation is one of ticking time bomb. By the time the global population reaches the critical carrying capacity of 7.5 billion, most of humanity will be children and youth who have yet to come of age in an adult world. It will be these children, the next generation of our earth, who will be hardest hit and most affected by the problems of population. It will be a critical age group in which the greatest human potential for development will become the most severely limited, frustrated and deformed. There will be tragic reverberations upon future progeny of the earth and in our collective capacity for adaptation in our earthbound environment. The time bomb will soon explode very rapidly when the next generation come of age to make normal, adult sized demands upon the environment, just to find general social systems broken down and under equipped to deal with them adequately. There will be systemic overloading and breakdown in many unexpected and unplanned ways.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">2. The political economy of our world system whose history of development and modernization has been one of potentially unlimited resource consumption and of human exploitation. We have created a global factory in which resources and labor are bought cheaply in undeveloped zones of exploitation and are sold dearly in overdeveloped regions of consumption. Both globally and domestically within nation states there is an increasing polarization between overdeveloped 'core' areas and undeveloped 'peripheries' or hinterlands. Between core and periphery there is uneven distribution and access to basic resources, vast differentials in the levels of consumption, availability of goods and services, income levels, education and opportunity. Peripheral areas tend to be the regions of greatest population increase as well as the areas where there is the greatest amount of environmental damage.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">3. Patterns of social mobility, mobilization and migration within a structure of global stratification, 'mechanisms' of population control, on one hand tend to destabilize the order and organization of the world system, and on the other hand tend to increase the adaptiveness of the system to the local, regional and global exigencies and emergencies. The global factory is accompanied by global stratification between first, second, third, fourth and fifth worlds, between five percent of haves who consume 95% of the earth's available resources and 95% of the have-nots who control and consume the remaining 5%, in a world where one billion over consumers are counter balanced by one billion people living in hopeless, abject, 'absolute' poverty without opportunity of escape, and the remaining 3/5's caught in a no man's land of relative poverty in between.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There are occurring global patterns of international and regional migration--labor flowing from zones of exploitation to zones of consumption, 'brain drains' of educated elites from peripheral regions to core areas, increasing numbers of displaced domestic refugees and international homeless people who have been cast out by the wheels of modernization and systematically excluded and prevented from re-entering the system.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To control and channelize the mobility of people and to render the masses of humankind docile and obedient to the dictates of the system, national and international bureaucracies have been established which systematically encapsulate people of different status. Vast screens of obfuscation and co-option quite systematically block or hinder either geographical or social structural mobility within the global system.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">4. Global media and systems of symbolization and information reinforce and legitimate the progressive development of the world system. The culture of consumption has established a global hegemony which threatens to destroy the vitality and function of traditional local and regional cultures. Values of consumption are being exported to periphery regions without the availability of income which makes such consumption feasible.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Relative deprivation, group reference, cognitive dissonance, frustration aggression, the revolutions of equality and of rising expectations are frameworks of understanding the spontaneous rise of radicalized mass movements and the political factioning of groups operating as political economic special interest groups, as largely self organizing processes resulting from the human response to systemic exploitation and reflective of the super criticality of the world system.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">With increasing radicalization of special interest groups, organized around principles of race, ethnicity, nationality, family, religion or communitas, there are increasing levels of inter-group friction and strife and increasing competition for resources which eventuates in militarization and increased levels of violence. Such groups threaten to destabilize the world system and in turn require heavy handed measures of totalitarian control.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">5. The extremely evolved state of militarism in the world today, and the global militarization of many groups, increases the likelihood of warfare spreading from one area to others and of escalating in levels of violence. In a highly integrated system, minor perturbations are more likely to eventuate in system wide reverberations and damage. War is most likely to be started by groups that sense or fear some impending disaster such as famine, and seek to preclude such disaster by coercive appropriation of another group's resource base. Maintaining high levels of militarization and the machinery for the mobilization for war, exacerbates the likelihood and levels of violence. War is as likely to occur between trading partners or allies as not--the more frequent the economic interactions between groups the greater the likelihood of eventual conflict. Our recent world history has only demonstrated that world wars have occurred repeatedly, have escalated towards totality in levels of violence, are not controlled by the balance of power and can be precipitated by relative minor events or the rise to power of unpredictable irrational groups.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is in context of these general human patterns and processes that the interrelated problems of global ecology must be framed. Rapid deforestation, the greenhouse affect, global warming, atmospheric pollution, destruction of the ozone layer, depletion of fossil fuels and many minerals, contamination and destruction of marine and aquatic environments, upsetting of normal cycles of the hydrosphere, lowering of groundwater tables, soil erosion and nutrient depletion, desertification and desiccation, loss of evolutionary genetic potential with the extermination of many species of flora and fauna, permanent loss of arable land to modern development, radiation contamination, all of these environmental problems must be seen as caused and aggravated by social circumscription due to world wide development and in turn causing and aggravating the problems of social circumscription.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It seems that the world system must reinforce its order and organized domination in ever more coercive and controlling ways in order to maintain its dynamic stasis in relation to increasing levels of environmental and social circumscription and in response to the rise of social movements which continuously threaten to destabilize and damage its functioning.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">By superimposed, coercive and manipulative reinforcement of the global regime of capitalist order and organization, the whole system must ossify into a generally inflexible authoritarian power structure in which local conflicts are contained at local levels without spreading to other areas. But with such rigidity and ossification and increased levels of organization, management and integration, the system itself will become less and less locally, regionally and globally adaptive to environmental changes and which its own development imperative is inducing. The system must eventually reach a state of super critical mass in which chain reactions throughout will lead to its systemic 'deconstruction' and disintegration. It will break down in depression and cease to function at all.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It must be understood that the system itself is not the solution to the problems and predicaments of human development in an earthbound environment. Such a system is great and impersonal and it is this very greatness and impersonalness which prevents it from meeting human needs on a local individual level, and which ultimately renders it environmentally and evolutionarily mal-adaptive.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Earthboundedness pre-structures and pervades our entire existence. Global contradictions are felt by every individual in many small ways--defining our ultimate horizon predicating all other considerations. This has fostered a new sense of pervasive anxiety about the world in the need to know and respond responsibly in new earthbound environments. We live in a world ridden by multidirectional, multidimensional pushes and pulls, forces and lines of stress which disintegrates the individual sense of order and control and undermines human identity. This anxiety has gone from neurotically obsessive to psychotically compulsive, resulting in a kind of social schizophrenia, a paranoid 'archosis' in a collective need to know which in its frustration becomes environmentally destructive.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We are in an age afflicted by a basic crises of human identity--of a need to find ourselves within the vast and impersonal system and a need to reestablish a relationship with nature within ourselves.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This condition is characterized by the embodiment of the principle of Absence, or of 'nonbeingness'--a general sense of meaning loss, anomie, of purpose for being, of a feeling that something vague is missing or misunderstood. It is associated with feelings of loneliness, anonymity and deep seated alienation from our own natural sense of being. It fosters a sense of self as if this were but an empty, flat reflection in a mirror or projection upon a screen. We come to see ourselves in a 'derealized' sense as if performers on stage separated from ourselves.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is no longer a classic battle between the superego and the id--self controls reinforced by the constraints of successful adaptation in our system have been completely internalized to an unconscious level. The system and its symbolic context has become our unconscious--the system is within us, individually and collectively.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We sense critical absence of being because in the complete internalization of our world order and with the identification with its role models, status and values, in our lives, we have become cut off from the basis of our own being, unreflexive and unselfconscious which predominates in the most rationalistic way. We become out of touch with our own genuine self, cut off from our own deep seated roots in nature. Though repressed, nature remains as a prisoner deep inside ourselves, forever reminding us of its missing presence, or critical absence.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The Self has become strongly, deeply divided between a public ego of presentation and a hidden self of private fantasy. The two worlds are disconnected and effectively sundered.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If there is a need to know, there is also a corresponding need to unknow, and these needs work at cross purposes and lead to schism in our personalities. Unknowing means avoiding symbolically those things which we do not know and so fear, tuning them out of our environmental awareness, acting as if they did not exist in our fields of view or relationships.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In order to cope in our daily lives we erect barriers which have the efficacy of common sense and naturalness of folk psychology and which block the flow of threatening or contradictory information in our lives. Our world has become one inundated by information--information overload is a common occurrence, while the effective and timely processing of information has become critical to our adaptive success within the system. We avoid or prohibit the unknown because we fear it and we remain ignorant of what we fear. We create convenient conceptual frameworks by which to safely categorize, channelize and hence sanitize the 'noise' emanating from our new earthbound environments. We manufacture elaborate mythologies, ideologies, sophisticated systems of rationalization and legitimization which allow us to maintain a sense of complacency and control in our environments.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our system has engineered sophisticated technologies and techniques which allow us to regularly cope and function with large quantities of information. Techniques of mass production and marketing have been applied via the media to the cultivation and development of the 'human mass' and a new brand of mass mentality, the primary preoccupation and function of which is the consumption of the effluvia of production and the elimination of its own effluvia.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Part of the crises of human identity is that the human being is increasingly identified as a member of 'mass oriented society' characterized by numerical, statistical anonymity, social anomie, and the habits and values of mass production/consumption, whose social role identity is determined primarily by the relative position with the production/consumption hierarchy. The modern modal personality is characterized as a 'mass oriented personality' with needs, desires and behaviors corresponding to the ethos of the system. Human beings have been reified into things, objects of production/consumption which can then be translated into quantifiables of time, money, man hours, man bits and man bites.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We have created for ourselves a cultural hegemony characterized by implicit denial of subjective experience. It is a culture of circular deceit and delusion, of living our 'vital lies' rooted in conformity to the ethos of the system. Complicity in our new world culture of denial has its own complications--the vicious cycle of coping with systems of coping which are fundamentally deceitful and delusional. Our system is controlled by a blind ideological program in which many people are in charge but no one is ultimately responsible. It is a secularized ideology of rationally whose information is propagandistic in its distortion of our earthbound realities.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is a new kind of authoritarian among us, characterized by his/her competency in administering, managing, manipulating, persuading, distorting and hiding information within modern contexts. In its worst form our new archetypical model of humanity is a modern kind of authoritarian who is quite rational, sophisticated, intellectual, multi-model, characterized by a sense of completeness, lack of subjectivity, non-reflexive invisibility and transparency. The modern authoritarian is a non-leaker of information, whose principle function is the simplification and reduction of the 'noise' of contradiction in our new environments. They are the new professional elites who are specialized in processing, filtering and modifying information for mass public consumption.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The modern authoritarian has become the model human resources manager and mass manipulator and marionetter. She/he is a professional performer and performing professional, guided primarily by motives, through apparently liberal and symbolically altruistic and selfless before the system are actually profoundly selfish, egocentric and self serving.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The key feature defining modern authoritarianism is covert and unconscious socio-pathy. It is no longer a battle between id and superego, but the silent domination and control of the ego over a sense of natural self--the completely internalized social ego and the totally projected sense of self. There is a psycho social inversion as opposed to social psychological conversion. If there is personification and personalization of social conflicts, then there is also a process of socialization and characterization of personal conflicts. The self is not an embodiment of contradiction and conflict--it has become too deeply and internally divided and detached from its own sense of being. It is merely the vessel of the ego.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In its best form, the new archetypical model of human being is a globe trotting poly-ethnic personality whose primary function is the brokering of boundaries and the mediation of differences.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Global peace is a primary concern of our collective future, a peace which seeks solutions upon a local level of involvement and interaction by individuals. Integration of world cultures, rather than their homogenization or hegemonization or destructive assimilation or marginalization, entails cultivating a multicultural continuum of a genuine 'third culture'. This requires the development of a 'post conventional' personality whose primary identity, loyalty and involvement is at a global level of concern, within an individually focused system which sustains and maintains standards of universal human rights and promotes the development of human potential.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We also need a better comprehension of the problem of evil in the world--an anthropology of evil which provides a ground for understanding authoritarianism, power, violence and corruption and the causes and consequences of these in our world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We need to achieve a 'changing of Mind' in human beings, collectively and individually. This is difficult to achieve in a system which has mastered techniques of conversion, brain washing and behavior modification in human beings. In any given random group of people, a certain fixed percentage will tend to be highly resistant to external stimuli. A similar but opposite percentage will be highly susceptible and suggestible to such environmental influences. There will always be an intermediate majority of people more or less resistant or susceptible. In authoritarian regimes, the majority can be easily swayed, persuaded, intimidated, cajoled, induced, to swing over to conformity led by the minority who are the complete conformists. This simplifies the task of isolating, selecting out and eliminating the opposed minority who pose a threat to the established order. Once conversion of the human character is achieved, it remains relatively fixed and stable, given regular doses of reinforcement. All people can eventually, effectively be broken, given enough time, enough inducement. Learned dependency and acquired helplessness are the primary results. And there are a variety of inducements available designed to lower the human threshold of resistance. Under the disguises of anonymity, mass humanity can easily be whipped upon into states of madness and mass hysteria, and can be lead to do things they would not normally in their 'right minds' think of doing.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Who controls the self, self control or other control, is a critical problem of our age. Changing minds and hearts and changing human character is a principal challenge of our new earthbound age.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">EARTHBOUND-NESS</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Bringing the state of being earthbound to conscious awareness, both individually and collectively, entails a completely new and different way of conceptualizing and seeing ourselves, our minds, our bodies, our families and our earthbound environments, whether locally, regionally, globally or cosmically, in symbolic inter-penetration with or new environments. We must find the source of this transformation in ourselves, and implant it in the cultural germination of our children, and we must sow its seeds and cultivate its grassroots until it takes hold and spreads to cover the whole earth with healthy new growth. We must redraw the boundaries of our imagination, vision, sensitivities and sensibilities and redefine the borders which separate people from one another. Our challenge will become our children's burden.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The way is clear, only the will power is lacking.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">ENVIRONMENTAL PROBES</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The human confrontation with new environments demands alternative ways of seeing and relating. Successful adaptation depends upon the ability to recognize these new environments for what they are, and then to recognize ourselves situated within them. Encountering new environments situates us upon the edge of our own existence, requiring vision instead of blindness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We need to initiate a set of textual explorations, literary 'probes' into new regions of mindscape and new relations of ideas basic to our encounters with new earthbound environments. We need to review the terms and meanings long taken for granted as given in some of our most important intellectual paradigms dealing with human reality. Many important insights remain entrapped in esoterica, encapsulated within jargonistic idioms and rhetorical designs purporting to allow the knowledgeable reader to do virtually anything but to think and make judgments independently. We need to deal not just with definitions of terms, but with the many relations which cohere between words, concepts and ideas, and with 'meta-relations' which seem to cohere between relations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Opening our minds is a way of opening our eyes, to better read the messages contained within our new environments.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">NEW ENVIRONMENTS</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A new world civilization demands the reformulation of new commitments, new voices, a new collective consciousness and social conscience. It demands new resolutions, new habits, new symbols and finding new pathways to human development. It demands alternative possibilities within alternative environments.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But what choices do we really have if no viable alternatives are made available? The great and impersonal forces of evil are better organized, better equipped, better trained and better armed than ever before. They have great sciences, technologies, bureaucracies, academies, societies and resources at their disposal whose solitary purpose is the maintenance of the status quo of world wide class hegemony in the most effective, efficient and economical manner possible.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The problem had become one not so much of prevention--of not becoming something worse--but of cure, of learning to overcome authoritarian repressions and internalizations which have already prevented us from realizing our greater human potentiality. It is a matter of how to unlearn how to unbecome the kind of unbecoming people we learned to be.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this we must learn to work against momentous forces of our own making, against the sense of history and destiny we have created for ourselves, against the forces of great traditions which stand in our way. We must fly in the face of many long established values, even against our own experience and deeply ingrained common sense.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">CHILDS PLAY</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Children are the living symbols of our future. They are the breathing embodiment of our hopes, expectations, concerns, frustrations, strengths and weakness. Children are the creatures of our myths, the caricatures of our civilization.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We are the amateur professionals and our children are the professional amateurs. They are the ones with the inherent capacity for challenging new environments.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our future is a child's reality. Alice's innocent faith in the reality of her language guided her successfully through the strange landscape of Wonderland. Children are the 'natural' amateurs who 'see' the world in and of itself. They come to know it in plain and simple terms without the adult vanities of false preconceptions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A child's natural approach to organizing the experiences of its environment is to 'tear down' in order to 'analyze' its elements, in the process 'unlearning' all that the adult perceives as appropriately ordered.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must 'unlearn' how to see our new environments in order to better recognize the alternatives before us and to reconstruct a different sense of reality. By 'tearing down' our world we must unlearn how to perceive the rhythms of its elements without the preconditioning of our tainted traditions of experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Children are the complete anarchists. They leave nothing alone that is within their reach, upsetting everything adults try to keep in place. The saving grace in childhood is that children are not held responsible for their liberties.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">For our children nothing is too sacred. We will have many important lessons to teach our children and they will have much to learn. But we will also have important lessons to learn from them and they shall teach us a great deal more.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">NECESSARY POSSIBILITY</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Possibility is more than a state of human consciousness or imagination. It is the prerequisite ground of our future becoming. Determining the impossible, the duty of our science, is a gradual movement from the imagination of possibilities through reasoning of plausibilities to the determination of probabilities. It gives birth to the realization of the present, the concrete, immediate factualities of the here and now. Our future environment is a function of our imagination of possibility.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The future remains a mystery yet to be solved. It is an unfinished field of infinite possibilities.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We are rushing headlong into the darkness of our destiny, accelerating at every turn of events that brings to our vision new series of encounters, new fields of experience, new kinds of expectations and new environments. As we approach the edge of possibility, the state of our common existence teeters upon a dark chasm beyond which all we have known will become lost to all that we do not yet know. Standing upon this edge our traditions and history becomes inverted into 'trends' and tendencies which are supposed to guide us like a lantern into the darkness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We have neither the pre-science to foretell future events nor the ability to prevent our future becoming. Only shadowy outlines emerge vaguely upon our horizon, and these bare forms give us a premonition of things to come.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Now we can speak only of our common needs, our common limits, the basic parameters of our common experience which will go forward into the darkness with us. We have come to a grand juncture, and we have a collective choice to make about our common destiny.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our future will be shared in a shared world in which each person's fate will be bound up in the collective fate of all humankind, in ways never before experienced.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the same way that the past demands a fair and hones hearing, an accounting of actions and inactions, so also does the future demand an audience, a witnessing and a troupe of actors ready to perform its tragic comic dramas.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We will either orchestrate our future or fail to, having made wise choices or having choices made for us. But our basic choices remain the same.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our future will either be collectively shared, composed of common needs, limitations, aspirations and destinies, or else it will prove to be a future of collective failure.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">MYTHICAL META-THEMES</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The environmental meta-themes of our future are always mythical. The ability to envision possible futures requires a mythic imagination, in this way imagination of new environments sets the stage for the enactment of human dramas of struggle between man and woman, youth and age, life and death, birth and dying, right and wrong, the beautiful and ugly, the natural and supernatural. These are some of the fundamental antinomies which constitute the fabric of our minds and the ground of our meaning. Thus our reality becomes mythical and our myth becomes reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our paramount meta-theme is that the human spirit will struggle forward against the reactionary forces of evil. The essence of this spirit is creative, life giving, born of survival against necessity. It is always at odds against the powers of organized evil in which the authoritarian character strives unrelenting to predominate.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The race to the Capitalistic finish line will have only a few winners but there will also be many angry losers--people's dispossessed of their basic rights and freedoms, disinherited of their children's franchise in life's opportunities and dignities. The trickle down illusion of technological progress will then not sustain the delusion of inevitable global prosperity and participatorial equality that has been so cleverly fostered and foisted upon uneducated masses by the image control engineers of the world system.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The permanently disenfranchised will refuse to remain silent for very long in the face of their children's increasing hunger. Hopeless in the deprivations of terminal poverty and choiceless in the irreversible depredations of unforgiving exploitation, they will raise a cry of battle and call out for equal justice. Their chorus will drown out the empty voices of authority.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The apocalyptic vision of our environment is upon us. Double crossed expectations and common feelings of unequal deprivation and injustice, lacking even the false virtue of necessity will give rise to global revitalization.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">OUR COLLECTIVE FUTURE</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In our never shrinking 'global village' we can no longer afford to foster delusions of national, ethnic or cultural superiority, the arrogance of narrow egoism or of blind ethnocentrism. No longer can we consistently ignore in or protected affluence the plight of so many other people. No longer can we cultivate effectively a selfish sense of distinctive separateness and privileged prerogative.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The enlightened spirit of a private, disinterested, literate soliloquy on the condition and fate of humankind will then become a hypocritical anachronism of a shared future.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Becoming a collective future, it will become a future collectivity--a new global social environment hitherto unexperienced by humankind, consisting of the active sharing of common needs and aspirations and concerns, and of exchanging different cultural values and elements.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But however common, however shared, our future will remain preeminently a human one, composed by human actors in their daily lives.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A social collectivity of any scale is never a reality apart from or independent of the people who together compose it. It is not an insect colony or a wild herd dominated by instinct and necessity. It is not an independent, empirically separable entity or organism. It does not breathe, live or think independently of the collective will of the human constituency.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is simply a shared state of being and wherever we search for it we will only find a common collection of people talking and working together toward a common cause.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The word collectivity of the future will be collectively made up of individuals who are independently thinking and autonomously acting and freely speaking out.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We cannot afford to promote a myth of a narrow, selfish egoism or that social man is necessarily a social insect. Nor can we afford to promote the illusion of the organiismic whole or of the social ethic founded upon the anthropological misconception of man the pack animal, man the ape, and the law of survival of the fittest. Greed and selfishness are no longer affordable virtues, as neither are selfless devotion and altruistic sacrifice.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The lesson of our histories leave us little guidance and less hope in these collective affairs.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">UNNECESSARY REALITIES</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our world cannot any longer afford the luxury of functioning for the good of the one and the few at the expense of the all and the many.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the long run, the world system cannot work upon the principle of 'unlimited good' for a limited few for it will otherwise spell collective disaster for all.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The collective ideologies and mass myths which sustain the mechanisms of the world system are becoming obsolete as we fail to resolve their inherent contradictions of class and power, affluence and poverty, economic efficiency and exploitation, inequality and violence. The bubble of promised expectations will burst in the storms of global crises and catastrophe.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Science and technology cannot always be relied upon to create the solutions to or collective problems, but in the long way may create more problems than they will be able to solve.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Technological development is not necessarily, unreservedly beneficial and efficacious for the progressive future of human civilization.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Energy, harnessed in ever greater magnitudes does not necessarily lead to greater efficiency, economy of effort, efficacy of design, or more manageable waste. High energy entrapment systems become concomitantly more wasteful and consumptive whatever the developmental rationale or technical strategies.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Information locked away in great treasures with privileged, graded access by the high priests and super specialist of the world technocracy, is no longer necessarily good for its own sake, nor does it necessarily lead down the golden pathway to collective enlightenments.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">….Bits and watts--which here stand for units of information and of energy respectively--when packaged into any mass produced commodity in amounts that pass a threshold, inevitably constitute impoverishing wealth. Such wealth is either too rare to be shared or it is destructive of the freedom and liberty of the weakest…(Ivan Ilich, 1978:xiii)</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Buckminster Fuller's anti-entropy equation of energy plus information equals something from nothing is not necessarily a valid design for the future or unequivocally the wisest kind of formulaic rationalism to apply like a band aid to our common existential dilemmas. More for less formulism leads down the road to less for more social patterning of exploitation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Storing information, money or energy in ever greater quantities is not necessarily the wisest strategy for meeting our collective future, as it tends to promote social patterns of elitism, hoarding, monopolism, class inequality, corruption and a false and pretentious idealism of privileged superiority.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Nor is the ideology of communism the only necessary alternative to a capitalist dominated world system, as communist societies face the same basic dilemmas of developmental inequality. Marx has long been dead. In facet, communism and capitalism as ideological doctrines have been cut from the same basic philosophical cloth of the western tradition of rationalism based upon the principles of progress and utopia.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">AND THE NEED FOR A COMMON WELL BEING</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The future of humankind's existence upon earth will not depend upon advances in technology, in greater development, more industrialization, mechanization, automation or professionalization or upon amassing ever greater stockpiles of potential energy or greater mountains of information. Our future health will not depend upon the development of superior tank armor, more accurate missiles or even less costly military machines.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The future of humankind will depend greatly upon our collective ability to meet certain basic conditions of human existence:</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">1. The extent of the realization of human rights and fulfillment of individual human potential.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">2. Our collective capacity to live tolerantly, peacefully and compassionately with ourselves and with one another.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">3. The extent to which we can establish effective population management techniques (i.e. birth control, health delivery systems) on the basis of voluntary participation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">4. The extent to which we can systematically eradicate and control common diseases and disorders which afflict humankind and the extent to which we can improve life maintenance systems.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">5. The extent to which we can establish educational systems which teach effectively the values of equality, social responsibility and which foster freedom of expression and cultivate human creativity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">6. The extent to which we are able to reestablish an ecological balance and conservative harmony with our global environment, instead of promoting a predominant economic order founded upon the domination and destruction of the natural environment.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">7. The extent to which we are able to put available technologies, energy entrapment systems and treasuries of expertise, knowledge and understanding, to pragmatic work in the reevaluation, reorientation and redirection of the predominating world order to more efficaciously realize the preceding conditions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The future well being of humankind will be measured in spiritual terms of our collective, common emancipation from the tyranny of violence and necessity and the realization of basic human rights, freedoms and responsibilities.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our future health will be measurable in real terms of how well we eliminate hunger, alleviate human suffering and stress and effectively control birth and death.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The future of our collective well being as both a global civilization and as a common biological species will be measured in terms of how well we will overcome our most pressing problems of global militarism, economic imperialism, ecocide, pollution, over population and poverty.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our collective destiny will be decided in terms of how well we will be able to reestablish a new and better harmony of common well being based on an alternative ecology of global culture and civilization not predicated upon the domination and control and alteration of our natural environments but in the reestablishment of a more natural symbiosis.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Furthermore, it is demonstrable that the common well being of the whole of humankind will depend immensely upon the well being of the autonomous individual. The future will thus pose a grand paradox between the interdependence of the whole and the independence of the many parts--paradox about our common existence upon the edge of our critical juncture which will become our common problem to resolve.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">GAME THEORY AND WORLDS OF GOOD</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Some social theorists have sought to apply game theory to the understanding of our social realities. The prototypical peasant world view is one of a 'world of limited good'--it is a zero sum game in which one competitor gains are always another's loss in the competition for ever scarce and limited resources.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Some scientists have sought to discover evidence of optimizing strategies, cost minimizing strategies or profit maximizing strategies in different patternings of subsistence, foraging, food getting, marketing, fishing, etc. It is always to be wondered whether or not people actually plan their daily lives and moves in such a rational way.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our world system of capitalism is founded upon an opposed strategy of profit maximization, based upon world view of 'unlimited good'. Capitalists are playing a 'non-zero sum game' in which the results of interaction between competitors do not always evenly cancel one another out, but produce surplus.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Such a framework has not come to terms yet with the earthbound Malthusian view of the world which sees it as a world of 'diminishing good' played out in a 'negative sum game' in which one person's gain is everyone's net expense and loss. In an earthbound world the strategy to be adopted is one of minimizing losses through minimizing gains, rather than optimizing or maximizing gains through minimization of losses. Rather than a conservative, 'peasant' outlook, the predominate earthbound perspective is one based upon rationing of limited, irreplaceable commodities in order that they may be preserved for as long as possible. This leads us to a world of 'unrestricted good' based upon principles of preservation and prevention.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In an earthbound world of diminishing good, there will be no point in leveling on a global scale, as there will be nothing to level and no amount of resources sufficient to distribute evenly throughout the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">With a world of increasingly widespread deprivation as the rationed reserves run out, there will be local patterns of hoarding, panic, strategies of diversification, depression, followed by raiding, feuding, social movements of all kinds imaginable, in confrontation with increasing authoritarian power structures.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">LIFEBOAT REALITIES</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">As we run out of room, out of food, out of resources, out of water, in our earthbound world, we will be confronted with certain basic existential dilemmas--on lifeboat earth that has overreached its carrying capacity, who shall be cast overboard and who has the responsibilities for making such decisions, or is it really a 'problem' in that there is 'always room for one more' as the rest of us whose security and safety is assured are constrained to 'tighten our belts' a little more.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">So far we have history of casting out the poor, the dispossessed and the weak.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Lifeboat dilemmas are a consequence of life control mechanisms running into death control mechanisms--those agencies which protect, preserve and prolong human health by preventing death and disease. Immunizations compete with birth control drugs, hospitals compete with military machines, schools compete with penitentiaries, old folks home compete with heart lung machines.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We do not yet know what the final 'solution' to the 'problem of population' will be, if there is one. It may be that there is in fact no real problem at all, or is not as immediately pressing as we now believe. Science may save the day, or find the final solution, or else the population problem will resolve itself for better or worse. As a collective, we have a choice of pathways, between Hitler's and Gandhi's solution to the problem of 'people'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">SELF ORGANIZED CRITICALITY</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Natural systems maintain a level of equilibrium according to principles of conservation. This level of equilibrium within a system determines the criticality of its self sustained growth, beyond which systems tend toward 'supercritical states' resulting in predictable chain reactions which lead to major events which eventuate in restoration of conservation in the system at the previous 'supercritical' level. The chain reaction maintains the criticality of the system.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Such systems are characterized by internal contradictions--they are unstable in many different directions but the critical state is absolutely robust. Local features are continuously changing due to events, but the statistical properties of the whole and of the size of the events, remains stable.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Criticality is a global property of the whole system--local dynamics may vary unpredictably, but they are a function of the total history of the whole system and critical events would persist with a merciless frequency that is an erratic 'flickering' which is nonrandom and implies a connection of the dynamics of events with past events of the system. Such flicker noise is a superimposition of signals of all sizes and durations produced in a dynamic system in a critical state composed of chain reactions of all sizes and durations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Such self organizing systems are chaotic but nonrandom systems. Small initial amounts of uncertainty grow exponentially over time and prevent long term predictions which would require correspondingly exponential increases in information. Weak chaos generates uncertainty not exponentially but by a power law--it grows with time but much more slowly and predictably, on the border of chaos. Fully, strong chaotic systems have a time scale beyond which it is impossible to make predictions--weakly chaotic systems lack such a time scale and so allow for predictions. All self organized critical systems are weakly chaotic.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Such complex systems are governed by relational values or 'boolean functions' in which each component is a function of two or more other components of the same system and everything is related to everything else. There is a cycling of different possible patterns over a duration which fall into certain states. Minor mutations can precipitate 'damage' throughout such systems. Some such systems exhibit a remarkable capacity for falling into very stable patterns in which a majority of its relational patterns become fixed into stable clusters. This stability prevents widespread systemic damage by restricting the region affected to small areas of the whole. This is referred to as the evolution of 'anti-chaos'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Natural evolution exhibits features of such critical systems which evolve and 'adapt' themselves in a self organizing manner at the 'edge' of chaos. Such systems are likened to fluid states, in which the number of 'fixed' stable components of the whole are relatively few and far between, as opposed metaphorically to 'fixed' and unchanging states of solids and the completely chaotic states of gases. Such an explanation of critical self organization may explain the saltational 'punctuated equilibrium' observed in the fossil record, related to rapid speciation events following long durations of stability.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The conservation of the number of elements is an important feature of many systems which naturally evolve to a critical state. 'Throughout history, wars and peaceful interactions might have left the world in a critical state in which conflicts and social unrest spread like avalanches.' (American Scientific, Per Bak and Kam Chen, Jan. 1991)</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is not unreasonable to suggest that symbol systems and the social systems they represent and the dynamic political economic behavior of such systems within a global framework, are systems of self organized criticality which naturally develop toward supercritical states by the natural increase in population which the functioning of such systems promote. Social movements are like 'flicker noises' in such systems, which chain reactions may precipitate major events like 'avalanches or earthquakes'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">GLOBAL ORDER</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is estimated that the whole world will become structurally integrated into a single hierarchically ordered political economic system. Some see it happening now, others forecast it within a century, others believe it will take a couple of hundred years and yet others believe it will happen by the year 4850A.D. if such political economic integration is inevitable, then the questions of when, how and why are critically important. But it is also to be wondered whether such world order will be desirable--can it be achieved by peaceful cooperation or only through imperial conquest and domination? And will such a single world order necessarily be an Orwellian or Huxlian dystopia of the absolute and arbitrary rule of Great and Impersonal Organization of Evil, or may the characteristic millenarian vision of utopia be realizable by the progress of scientific technology which will result in a better world for everyone. Estimates based upon computer projections of current trends suggest that the present political economic disparities between global core and periphery are relatively stable and 'fixed' given the persistence and pressure of the political economic status quo of our Pax Amerikana.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is possible that such global order, if it is achieved by the conquest of war or the threat of violence, will depend upon the military organization of societies which must socialize its citizenry for the mobilization for war. Such socialization for the mobilization for war, or for 'economic competition' which seems to be the 'pursuit of war by other means' has negative consequences for the realization of human potential and humanity upon earth. If this hypothesis is correct, then the system which promotes uncontrolled capitalist expansionism and exploitation must have negative consequences for a world order based upon an organizational ethos promoted by the threat of violence.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Political and military fascism has always been the dark underbelly of capitalist imperialism.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It seems necessary that any world order, if it is not to be founded upon the evil tyranny of the threat of violence must be founded on the rule of peace and the devaluation of violence. If such an alternative 'rule of peace' is possible, one which would minimize the threat of violence then a groundwork must be lain down which would demonstrate how global political economy can be effectively achieved in a non-capitalistic manner.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">OVERSPECIALIZATION AND ADAPTABILITY</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our present world system is no longer adaptable to the unexpected and unplanned. It does not respond in adaptive ways to the relinquishment of the motivation for social power. It cannot deal in any other terms than those upon which it was originally founded in a previous period. The earthbound environment is confronting the world system with a set of basic survival imperatives which the system is unable and unequipped to effectively deal with. The challenge is unmet and all attempts at adaptation are systematically frustrated. This inflexibility to natural change, the promotion of outmoded ideologies and commitments to lost causes and false organizational ideals, is occurring at all levels of the world system, as it becomes bogged down in an entangle political economic web of its own design. Our system has become in its structural hyper coherence, 'overspecialized' in its functional compartmentalization. Such overspecialization is a measure of its maladaptability in local contexts, and is a precursor to sudden, catastrophic events and eventual extinction of the system.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In its progressive quest for power, for control over change, for stability, it has become crystallized and solidified by too many constraints--it no longer balances flexibility at the edge of chaos, and must soon fall into its abyss.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">A NEW AGE AND AN OLD ONE</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We are at the dawn of a new age, and at the dusk of an old one. We stand in a twilight of transition as one sun sets and another rises. The new age will bring with it new sets of problems to be solved, as well as solutions to some old problems which have remained unresolved. The new age is an earthbound age, one characterized by new adaptations in new environments. The new age is the post scientific age--one that will no longer depend exclusively upon the workings of scientific technology to solve every problem challenging human survival. The new age will not be any better or worse than the old one, it will only be very different in very fundamental ways. Science will still progress and be important, but it too will have changed in revolutionary ways.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">THE PROBLEM OF POPULATION</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The Malthusian dilemma of the exponential growth of population beyond the carrying capacity of the natural system upon which it is based is coming to pass within our children's generation. Population is the 'key' problem of the earthbound perspective, but it is connected ecologically to another problem of the environmental degradation of the very natural substrate which supports the population. We are witnessing a point of critical convergence between population increase and ecological destruction, a threshold to explosive cataclysm which our science and technology cannot long forestall or prevent.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is estimated that our earth will soon overreach its optimum carrying capacity, beyond which further increase will only eventuate in further ecological degradation. The consequences of this will be measured not just in relative qualitative terms, of the loss of the quality of life for the majority of the world's people, but in 'absolute' quantitative measures of infant mortality, gross income, net nutritional intake, disease prevalence, life span, etc.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is theoretically speculated whether population increase 'drives' systems of social complication or is the result of the adaptive success of social systems. It is, as a 'natural system' one which passes from sub-critical through critical to supercriticality in that in its overloaded state it generates a process of fracturing breakdown. Population growth eventuates in the formation of social chaos, which results in the entropic breakdown of the social system which generates it and is generated by it.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Population increase will eventuate in other unforeseen consequences as it stresses and breaks down the system upon which it is based. The ecological dilemma of global overpopulation and environmental degradation becomes a 'biological time bomb' in which there is a built in time delay between the ignition of the fuse and the final release of its potential energy. Also in a hyper coherent, supercritical system , minor fluctuations in parts leads to major reverberations in the whole resulting in systemic destabilization. Things may happen spontaneously in one part and indirect resonance to causes in other parts.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Population increase begets mechanisms of population control which attempt to brake and slow down the snowballing growth. Such 'mechanisms' may be family planning, birth control, abortion, infanticide, marginalization or exclusion, migration or warfare. Some methods are more 'cost efficient' and effective than others--the elimination of the fetus represents less loss of investment of energy than the elimination of adults. So far, family planning is the most efficient 'mechanism' available, but the promotion of its effectiveness has faced serious and social obstacles.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The 'problem of population' leads to certain ethical dilemmas of 'lifeboat realities'--on lifeboat earth that has overreached its carrying capacity, who shall be thrown overboard and who has the responsibility for making the decision, or is it really a 'problem' in that there is may 'always be room for one more' as the rest of us whose security and safety is assured are constrained to 'tighten our belts' a little more.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Lifeboat dilemmas are a consequence of life control mechanisms running into death control mechanisms--those agencies which protect, preserve and prolong human health by preventing death and disease. Immunizations compete with birth control drugs, hospitals compete with military machines, schools compete with penitentiaries, old folks home compete with heart lung machines.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The 'problem of population' is also a 'problem of hunger' and a 'problem of disease' and a 'problem of poverty' and a 'problem of prosperity' and a 'problem of education; and a 'problem of inequality' and a 'problem of authority' and a 'problem of responsibility'. The last problem is perhaps the most important, because it may very well be the case that in the global system, no one is really in control and no one is really responsible. The 'problem of population' is beyond control, and decisions made or not made in relation to its final solution. This is more than just the social diffusion of responsibility, and even if everyone miraculously wake up one day in the near future and decided to assume earthbound responsibility in their own life in the world, the momentum of the population snowball and the consequences of environmental degradation will still carry all of us to the critical point of global climax.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We do not yet know what the final 'solution' to the 'problem of population' will be, if there is one. It may that there is in fact no real problem at all, or that the problem is not as critical or pressing as we now believe. It may be that science does find the final solution, or it may be that one way or another the population problem will simply resolve itself for better or worse. As a collective, we have a choice of pathways, between Hitler's and Gandhi's solution to the problem of 'people'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The biological time bomb may have a longer delay than we know, or our bomb experts may defuse it in time. From our privileged position of first world affluence, we tend to 'blame the victim' and put the burden of guilt upon poor people who have many children and large families, even though it is not scientifically understood whether population drives the system or the system drives the population. Poverty seems to beget overpopulation, but overpopulation also begets poverty. It is a vicious cycle that must be broken before it breaks us.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">OUR EARTHBOUND ECOLOGY</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From an ecological standpoint, the 'problem of population' is tied critically to the 'problem of environment'. If there were unlimited space, unlimited resources, unlimited water, unlimited forests, unlimited air and unlimited food, then there would be no environmental or population problem. In vain we look to the distant stars as a way out of our predicament. But the facts remain that the earth is being denuded of its last stands of forests, stripped of its mineral resources and its atmosphere, biosphere and landscape are being permanently altered by 'man made' processes. We are 'developing the earth' to a premature death--the growth of world civilization is resulting in permanent and irreversible alterations of the global environment, from destruction of the atmosphere, global warming, destabilization and contamination of the hydrosphere to mass extinctions of many species and the permanent loss of biological variability on the earth.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The entire problem of global ecology remains debatable, as it is not yet known exactly how large our energy reserves or mineral resources are, or how our atmosphere or hydrosphere will become adjusted in the long run to our presence and growth and development. Many still believe that science will still be able to solve all our problems if given enough time or if it can act in a timely enough manner. But the point remains that the earth is a limited sphere and its resources, once bountiful will eventually dwindle. The atmosphere cannot forever sustain itself in relation to the continuing increases in technological development.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Global ecology is not a disconnected set of variables--it is itself a global system in which one set of 'problems' is interdependent with all other sets of problems in some important way. We do not know well how deforestation affects the atmosphere, or how atmospheric contamination will affect life on earth. Burning of fossil fuels affects the atmosphere and the biosphere. We have both a set of interrelated ecological problems, and a single problem of global environment.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The environment is rapidly being eroded and the ecology as a system degraded. This degradation and erosion follows a long series of incidences of human destruction of natural environments in the process of creating 'cultural' environments. The global environment is rapidly becoming transformed from a 'natural system' into a 'cultural setting' and this transformation has both bad and good consequences. But it seems as if it is an irreversible, inevitable and runaway process that has been beyond anyone's capacity to control.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Environmental consciousness has become popular--there has been an 'awakening' to the 'problem' and a sudden proliferation of literature, media and public/private interest and investment in the 'problem'. While this is an optimistic sign of the times, its hard not to notice that this is a 'cultural' rather than a 'natural phenomena'. Such consciousness remains a privileged prerogative of first world societies that stand the most to lose and the least to gain from the kinds of changes which might lead to real solutions to the problems at hand. As a symbolic mode of representation, it is to be wondered whether this rather fashionable interest is not a part of the very consumption industry which seems to drive the whole problem in the first place. It is easy to point fingers at the policies and patterns of third world societies, but might they not be a symbolic scapegoat for our own repressed sense of guilt for being the cause of the problem'</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The cultural elaboration of ecological themata, as part of an 'ecology industry' represents not part of a solution to the problem of ecology but a prevention of the possibility of such a solution. Consciousness awakening and a high profile interest in ecological problems are not bad things, but neither does their industry provide the solution the problems it feeds upon, and even may hinder such solution by fostering collective illusions that money being spent on elaborated illustrated coffee table books devoted to global ecology will help in the effort to find solutions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This points up some basic dilemmas about the problem of ecology which we must learn to recognize and resolve, as they prevent our acquiring practices, habits, attitudes and objectives which might genuinely contribute to the solution of the environmental problem. In promoting symbol system which promote and preserve the status quo of social relations in the world, or by promoting the 'tokenization' of symbol systems which would otherwise threaten the status quo of political economy, we fail to face squarely and honestly the earthbound realities of which we are a part.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The global ecology movement has remained a 'molish' grassroots ground swell. The greening of global consciousness remains for the most part 'underground' as it must come into headlong conflict with the great and impersonal forces and interests of a global political economy founded upon technological development. It is apparent that the powers that be cannot be entrusted with the responsibility of caring for the earth in a way that will promote long term survival.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The dilemma of the problem of global ecology is that those who have the most power to decisively effect the kinds of changes which would have decisive consequences for life on earth are precisely the special interests groups who have the most invested in the status quo and the most to lose by such change. Most of the rest of us merely follow suit for the interest of our short term social survival. But we are leaving our posterity a poor inheritance.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">THE BIOLOGICAL TIME-BOMB</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The biological time bomb is an ecologically volatile system of resonance between social circumscription of overpopulation and related problems and environmental circumscription due to degradation, destruction and irreversible alteration of natural ecosystems. This 'supercritical system' is approach to a point of 'critical mass' of an inherent potential systemic instability which may suddenly but not unexpectedly 'go off' in a cataclysmic 'explosion'. We are running out of room and out of time, and out of the very things which sustain our being on the planet earth. Yet it is to be wondered whether it is in fact a 'time bomb' ticking to a 'global climax' or it is just a wound up alarm clock which will eventual just 'run down'. To a large extent, the understanding of our earthbound ecology is a big black box and we are not exactly sure what is inside of it. We are not sure whether the ticking coming from within is a bomb or just a clock.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But population, the environment and the interrelationship between them on a local, regional and global scale, poses a very real ecological problem. It is a problem which also has broader evolutionary consequences, not just for our own species, but for all of life on planet it, and for the whole planet as a living entity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The biological time bomb is in fact not a natural, biological 'climax' of life on planet earth, an inevitable outcome of evolutionary development. It is in fact a man made problem, and can therefore be called the 'cultural time bomb'. Human cultural development, an historical and non-evolutionary process, has been the main driving mechanism. But it is the biological consequences and the effects measured biologically, which make the bomb primarily a biological problem of global human global culture.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The primary experience of the time bomb are those of 'future shock'--of the exponential increase in interrelated phenomena which are the result in the supercriticality of the global system approach its threshold. 'Future shock' is in fact a form of 'culture shock' in that it is experienced as a cognitive and perceptual disorientation and feeling of loss of identity, in the encounter and adaptation to a rapidly changing global environment--one which is rapidly transforming from a natural to a cultural orientation. The consequence of this is the loss of our cultural capacity to cope with and collectively adapt to a changing global environment. We are quickly losing our adaptive abilities, and this reverberates in our personal individual lives. We are suffering paralysis from fear in our ability to deal with change at the very moment in our history that we must confront the most change. Fear of the bomb has frozen and unnerved us.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">HISTORY OF THE WORLD SYSTEM</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The history of 'modernization' of the world system is not to be confined to the industrial era of the rise of capitalism. The history of the world system is a history of the gradual rise of human civilization as a global phenomena with political, economic and socio-religious implications. It is in other words, the history of the political economic and socio-religious integration of the human population on earth. Capitalism and communism had precursors far back in ancient pre-history and classical history. The only thing 'modern' about them was not their political economic or socio-religious aspects, but rather the development of scientific technology and its social consequences. We cannot clearly separate out the political influence of conquering imperialistic armies from the economic influences of foreign markets and commerce from the socio-religious 'civilizing influence' of world religions. The history of the world system is one of gradually increasing integration of the global population into a single system based upon political, economic and socio-religious principles of organization.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The contemporary period of this history with which we are most concerned is one which is characterized by global 'capitalism' that contains political economic domination/dependency between 'core' metropolis regions, on global, regional and local scale and outlying 'peripheral' areas. Power and wealth are focused at the 'center' of this capitalist system and relations between core-periphery are predominant in that they determine the life ways and life chances of all individuals within the system. It is a system which is characterized between gross inequalities between the core and the periphery, in which the function of the center is primarily consumption as a symbolically legitimating the materialistic values of the capitalist mode of production, while primary production is the primary function of the periphery, as the material base which supports the core.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The process of development/underdevelopment characterizing this capitalist world system is basically one of 'class polarization'--of separating people out into two polarly opposite classes, at local, provincial, national, regional and global levels, characterized by their unequal access to commodities of the global market. These two classes may be lumped into the consumers and the producers, the function of the former being primarily symbolic, the function of the latter being mostly physical labor. These may also be separated on the basis of parasite and host classes or exploitative and exploitable classes. It is largely a class phenomena because its social relations are focused in the exchange relations of the market place.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is a third, in-between class, referred to in the global sense as the 'semi-periphery' and in a domestic sense as the 'middle class'. The political economic function of this class is to intermediate the social relations between the core and the periphery, or the upper and under classes. Bureaucratically mandated and empowered from above, from the standpoint of the core they resemble the periphery, while from the point of view of the periphery they are part of the core. Their function is to serve as a buffer to interclass conflict and to provide a central ideological prop for the articulation of the whole system. Extreme polarization tends to pull this middle class apart, to disintegrate it between the two extremes, whereas increasing systemic integration tends to pull the two extremes towards the shared middle ground.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is this class which is most characterized by inter-positional ambivalence and therefore cognitive dissonance of status ambiguity. It is for this reason that the world view of this class is said to suffer the most class/status consciousness and to have the greatest sense of 'false consciousness' or a collective illusion of its identity. This in-between class is also characterized by its structural heterogeneity--it comprises the greatest diversity of social interests and orientations, being at once the most conservative and reactionary supporters of the status quo and simultaneously the most fertile element for revolution and challenge. It is a class by virtue of its 'anti-structural' relation to either extreme. It is usually difficult to clearly identify the boundaries of the middle class, as they tend to grade off into the upper and lower classes. The 'middle class' therefore is largely a 'fiction' which maintains the boundary between the two extremes, by fixing a relative distance or difference which the middle class must bridge. It is not surprising then that the primary preoccupation of the middle class is that of social mobility and the symbolic representation of such mobility.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Besides an international division of labor and international patterns of labor movement, the capitalistic world system can be characterized by the 'global factory' as an index of the degree of political economic integration of the world. Production and consumption become complex international systems in which materials produced in one part are manufactured in another part, to be assembled in yet another, to be packaged in another and finally to be marketed and consumed in a final, separate part.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The key characteristic of the capitalist world system is the degree of disparity and inequality between the core and the periphery. This becomes the primary symbolic determinant of ones structural position within a global context, translated into ones level of consumption or distance from primary production.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">THE GLOBAL CONTEXT</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The world system is defined by its global context, and its history from its earliest beginnings has always been a world history. There are several levels of analysis of this context, the local, provincial, national, regional and global levels. These levels, subsumed by higher levels, or expressed by interconnections between lower levels (global is 'interregional or international', provincial is state or county or sub-national). These levels are characterized by economic markets of exchange, bureaucratic levels of administration and socio-religious symbols of identity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is reverberation and resonance between the levels such that what predominates at the global level is predetermining at all the other levels. There is a sense of 'domestic analogy' of the global paradigm such that 'core periphery' relations expressed regionally and internationally are reflected in core periphery relations sub-nationally, locally and provincially. Core periphery relations within developed and developing nations are reflective of the same core periphery internationally and globally.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This is also reflected in rural urban, core periphery patterns of diffusions and migration. Migrations from outlying provinces to built up city areas for work opportunities is a reflection of the larger international process of migration from peripheral nations or regions to core nations or regions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the political economy of the world system, it is no longer appropriate to separate definitively economic migration from political refugees--but the world system is characterized by 'political economic migration' in which most migrants have mixed 'push pull' motives which are both political and economic.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To the extent that 'refugees' are characterized by the state of 'homelessness' as political migrants, they are the international equivalent of the domestic problem of 'homelessness'--domestic refugees from bureaucratic exclusion and persecution, to a large extent, the 'refugee' problem of homelessness, internationally and domestically, globally and locally, is the problem of 'political economic migration' within a world system.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">International stratification between first, second, third, fourth and fifth worlds become domestically recapitulated in provincial, national or local class stratification between upper, middle and lower, marginalized and excluded classes.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">THE PROBLEM OF COMMUNISM</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is a shortcoming of the political economic ideology of capitalism that anything which is anti-capitalist must be construed as 'communist' and that anything which is anticommunist must necessarily be capitalistic. This 'either or' dichotomization between capitalist/communist world orders reveals a critical dialectic between the two political economic ideologies which makes them cut from the same cloth. That point is that an alternative political economic philosophy can be simultaneously anti-capitalistic and anticommunist transcending the limitations of both and their dialectical entanglement.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Communism as a social revolutionary movement is a secularized form of political economic chiliastic, millenarian movement predicting a perfect time and a perfect utopia based upon equality and no conflict. All such movements have an ontology of development in moving from an idealistic prophetic stage into a realistic bureaucratic and authoritarian stage. Any such attempt at the realization of an ideal utopia is bound for failure because it entails forcing human diversity and social variability into a single mold under a single social paradigm for appropriate behavior. It results in the tyranny of the rule of the proletariat by the communist party--an exclusive, elite membership of a minority of individuals who have power to control all other people.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Such tendencies can be observed in the early formation of communist movements, in the demands and expectations and the power ambitions individuals have, usually frustrated by their own failure in the larger society, over other members or initiates within the movement. These true believers have a 'heart of darkness' which reveals, behind their total commitment to a superhuman social ideal, a totalitarian interest in power and the corruption which power can bring.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This is not to deride the value of Marxist political theory in its historical application to the rise of capitalism and the understanding of exploitation, but only to proffer the reality that such theory is not less ideological when it is promoted as a program for social revolution than the capitalist ideology which it contradicts.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Being both anti-capitalistic and anticommunist, then are there any other alternatives which lack the problems of both and which in its own realization would not suffer corruption in the world. Any such answer depends upon the reasonableness of its aims and the appropriateness of its means applied to achieving its ends.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">GLOBAL STRATIFICATION</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">World society has become stratified into the first developed world, the second socialist world, the third underdeveloped world, the fourth marginalized world and the fifth homeless world of political economic refugees. This class stratification occurs at all levels of analysis and is restricted domestically as well as internationally.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Global stratification can be characterized as 'diagonal' class caste stratification, combining skewed vertical and horizontal forms. The characteristic of this form of stratification is the formation of segmentary 'ethno-nations'--politically economic ethnicized groupings of people focused around occupational specializations or administrative niches which crosscut the loyalties and solidarity of nation state identity. Global society is a 'plural' multiethnic society whose ethnic divisions are reinforced from above, defined by unequal access to resources and social structural discrimination based upon ethnic identity. Political economic co-option from above is a kind of colonial strategy of 'divide and conquer' and of alienating minority groups of their own leadership who are placed into middle class management positions. This is a form of bureaucratic encapsulation from above, of bounding groups and reinforcing inter-group boundaries under an ideological umbrella of pan ethnic national solidarity. The military, the media, educational institutions and public offices all reinforce the ideological norm of inter-ethnic solidarity and equality, whereas in the marketplace and in the political structure the actual situation is predominant one of inter-ethnic competition and the promotion of infra-ethnic exclusiveness and solidarity. Ethnic organizations become as if 'castes' which have their own internal stratification and which feature ethnic mobility as a group. The result is a complex social structure of multiple overlapping hierarchies.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Within this system of global stratification, national identity and loyalty are undercut by ethnic allegiances formed around the organization of power and money and an individual's overall status position within the world system is predetermining of that person's interrelationships. These ties may cut cleanly across ties of national citizenship or even of ethnic identity. In other words, members of the same class cross culturally share more in common political economically and socio religiously than the same people may share nationally or culturally with people within their own society but of a different class caste status position.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The is overall system is characterized most by its fluidity and flexibility and its overlapping inter-positionality rather than its rigidity and between group boundaries. Movement of people and resources, a jxtapositioning and interposing of multiple status and a 'network multiplexity' are common features of this system. Mobility is neither purely social or vertical nor horizontal and geographical, nor is it unidirectional, but it has become lateral or diagonal mobility in which geographical mobility for jobs will entail as well social mobility. It is multidirectional in that individuals usually to and fro and the ties between homeland and host country, though long distance, are not really cut off. Refugees politically severed from their country of origin may nevertheless maintain quite extensive economic ties with people back home. Economic migrants living with secure jobs and investments and family in a host nation, may nevertheless maintain a sense of political loyalty and economic investment in the land they left behind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Modern society is becoming a complex mosaic of multiple ethnic communities which may have local points but not be 'ghettoized' into enclaves. Living in core regions is characterized by its ethnic diversity of different groups which either live separately but share a common marketplace and a common administrative authority or live proximately with one another but lead quite separate lives.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Another characteristic feature of this global stratification is the gross disparity between haves and have nots and the political economic inequality between members of different class castes. Globally there are one billion people or approximately one fifth of the earth's population who are characterized by over consumption way above the basic requirements of their biological sustenance. There are also one billion people who live in 'absolute poverty'--a death trap in which an individuals basic biological requirements are not met and from which there are very few opportunities of escape. Between these two groups of the worlds most and least privileged, there range a three fifths of the worlds population who lead lives of less rather than more wealth. In our own consumer oriented nature, 20 percent of the population control 80 percent of the resources, while the remaining 20 percent of the wealth is to be divided unevenly between the remaining 80 percent of the population. Our nation constitutes only 5% of the global population but it has been estimated that it consumes 95% of the global resources. Though exaggerated these figures illustrate the degree of disparity characteristic of the world system. Nations become ranked on a scale of consumption/production, as ethnic groups compete for positions of advantage within an international arena, and individual's juxtapose themselves for greatest strategic advantage, whether nationally, ethnically, individually or both or neither.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">THE GLOBAL VILLAGE</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The world system and its society has two contradictory forces which collectivize and relativize global identity. On one hand there is a concept of the 'global village' in which the modern 'media environment' of 'secondary orality' leads to a global communal outlook which tends to unite individuals internationally and cross culturally by a common modern world view. Part of this notion is the cultural hegemony and media imperialism of the world system of the acculturative and symbolic influence from the West to the Rest--a kind of global pan-westernization. Part of this process is the 'intellectual imperialism' of the colonization of non-western world views and the domination of western forms of rationalism and western modes of representation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This predominant trend is contrapuntal to an opposing trend towards 'ethnization' and diversification of multiple symbol systems which are a synthesis of acculturative syncretism. This antithetical trend is tending to 'relativize' the global village into its ethnic neighborhoods. Characteristic of this trend are the formation of social movements based upon ethnic or religious or special interest parties which are seen as competing with other such groups or with corporations or governments, for political economic advantage. Part of this process is that as peoples are drawn into the webs of interdependency of the world system, and a push pull toward the center, they confront the dilemma of relative deprivation and a revolution of rising expectations which , in inter-group competition, becomes expressed as a revolutionary movement of political economic equality. Relative deprivation and rising expectations in comparison with peer polity groups leads to cognitive dissonance and to 'frustration/aggression'. Symbolism of ethnic group solidarity are created ideologically and in group/out group consciousness is fostered for promoting projection of aggression upon out group members. These groups form their own separate hierarchy. Often such groups are co-opted within a larger bureaucratic framework, or become manipulated by larger interest groups.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Competition may turn into inter-group conflict, especially as one group seeks to dominate and control another. Conflict resulting from such social movements can be very destabilizing for the larger social system, and can arise unpredictably. Ascendancy of one group over another may lead to implantation of mechanisms of population control, either of enforced marginalization or segregation, or of ethnocide or genocide, as with the Jews and other Europeans by the Germans in order to create Lebensraum and to eliminate political economic competition. But there have been numerous more recent examples of the very same phenomena.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">POLITICAL ECONOMY</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the world system of the modern age especially, it is not possible to clearly distinguish politics from economics, nor to say whether the hen or the egg comes first. Economic monopolization entails political domination and vice versa, and capitalism and colonialism have always gone hand in hand in political economic imperialism. There is also always an associated socio-religious component, of integrated symbolic systems of collective representation which ideologically reinforce and promote political economic interests and motivations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is not possible to distinguish the pure economic migrant in search of job opportunities in the big city or abroad from the political refugee escaping discrimination and persecution, but it makes more sense to think of political economic refugees who are a mixed bag of economic motives and political aspiration/fears. Where there is structural poverty, there is some form of political domination and persecution.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Nor, in social movements is it possible to distinguish revolutions of rising expectations based upon economic interests from revolutions of equality based upon political inequalities, from religious syncretistic movements predicated upon the coming of the perfect age. There is only political economic equality, sought in the marketplace as well s in political representation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There are no longer purely economic or purely political interests--political decisions may be guided by economic motives and economic choices may be dictated by political interests. Class caste ethno-nations are political economic groupings organized on political economic principles. There are no longer purely political parties or purely economic corporations. Nor can we speak of purely economic 'achievement' motivations which do not also have socio psychological overtones of 'power' motivation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Boundaries, identities and differences are political economic boundaries, identities and differences.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">WORLD WARS</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The history of modern civilization has been in part a history of modern world wars. These wars have occurred periodically and have been characterized by their increasing international involvement and destructiveness. There has been global militarization of peacetime vertical escalation of destructive force potentials and horizontal proliferation of modern weapons of increasing lethality. The international arms industry and its markets have become one key sector of the global economy. For the past forty years the entire world has existed beneath the shadow of M.A.D., the umbrella of the threat of nuclear holocaust, alone the single most dangerous threat to the ecology and life on earth.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The cross cultural study of warfare reveals that most peoples go to war out of fear--a social hysteria--of 'expectable but unpredictable' disasters which will threaten food resources--warfare is an attempt to conquest and appropriate the resources of the defeated peoples in order to stave off or cushion against possible future famine. Warfare feeds on fear. Furthermore, international alliances increase the likelihood of war--the balance of power is easy to upset. Warfare is related to trade, conflict of interest and disputes between trading partners escalate to war more frequently than between nations which do not trade much with one another. Also, military equality, especially when there is rapid military buildup, increases the likelihood of two or more nations going to war.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Warfare, like migration, discrimination, segregation and other practices of birth control, has been looked at as a population control mechanism, not very 'cost effective' but quite 'efficient' in times of scarcity. This is linked to protein calorie malnutrition which is characteristic of conditions of underdevelopment and local regional overpopulation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is a sense of looking at global wars and its occurrence as 'supercritical events' similar to earthquakes, avalanches and perhaps famines. Social movements are also 'supercritical events'. Like earthquakes it is known that they will eventually happen, but not exactly when. They occur with a random frequency which is expectable but unpredictable. They are a function of the supercriticality of world political economic systems, of hypercoherent integration which may breakdown or destabilize under its own weight, triggered by minor, unpredictable events and reverberating into major cataclysms.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Every world war, major and minor has been the result of some ethno-national social movement which triggered a rapid mobilization of military machines culminating in conflagration with always unforeseen consequences.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">THE FREEDOM OF CAPITALISM</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The dilemma of capitalist economic doctrine is that it is founded upon a world model of unlimited good, or unlimited economic growth in a world of ever increasing profits and ever growing markets. It is a system which is sustained by growth and development as much as it sustains the same growth and development. Its success has been largely due to its marriage with science the technological spin-offs of which have lead to the illusion of the realization of a world of unlimited good.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A part of this dilemma is that, though it is a world of unlimited good, it is also a world of 'survival of the fittest' in a competitive marketplace, where one person's gains is another's loss. This imposes a contradiction in the capitalist world view which generated cognitive dissonance and a set of double standards leading to a compartmentalization or dichotomization of the capitalist world between public and domestic spheres of interaction. The illusion of that increased consumption becomes rationalized and that there is a 'trickle down' effect in the increasing standards of living of producers and consumers alike as a net consequence of economic growth. This fits the utilitarian ethic of the 'most good for the most people' understood in terms of 'units of pleasure' which can be easily 'commoditized' as 'values of consumption'. Competition in the marketplace promotes integration but also entails systematic 'exclusion' from the entire process--it sets up a system of consumption priorities which privilege few 'haves' from many 'have nots' which results in a 'consumption' hierarchy reinforced politically in that those who produce the most with their labor consume the least, and those who consume the most produce the least by their labor.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Besides generating inequalities and exclusion from the system, capitalism in an ecological orientation is 'anti-ecological' in that its promotion of unlimited production/ consumption entails eventually degradation of a globally limited and finite earth and its spin-off of wastes, pollution, planned obsolescence lead to contamination and accelerated depletion of resources. Part of this process is the adoption and promotion of a 'convenience' lifestyle, measured in terms of material appliances, based on the principle of the cultural control and domination of natural forces and their harnessing for a facilitation of the human production/consumption lifestyle.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The anti-ecological and developmental consequences of the promotion of capitalism or the production of environmental degradation and social circumscription and inequality, have the result of producing the biological time bomb--the historical convergence of the overpopulation of the impoverished and the destruction of the natural environment in the construction of the man made.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">A WORLD OF DIMINISHING GOOD</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The classic hypothesis contraposing the world view of 'limited good' which views the life of the peasant mentality as a 'zero sum game' and the bureaucratized world of the middle and upper classes as sharing in a world of 'unlimited good' in a 'non-zero sum game' is rooted in a very ethnocentric framework of modernization which attempts to explicate how and why tradition bound peasants should be so resistant to developmental 'processes' which promises a world of improvement. Such a framework has not come to terms with an Malthusian earthbound view of the world which sees it as a world of 'diminishing good' played out in a 'negative sum game' in which one person's gain is everyone's expense and loss. Decidedly, an earthbound world view is a 'post modern' perspective of the world which, antithetical to the optimizism of the development oriented scientific modern is a portentously pessimistic outlook upon the human future. The local peasant perspective from this alternative point of view does not seem any longer as pessimistic as it is merely conservative in scope--it promoted a certain social egalitarianism which hindered the rise of parasitic bureaucracies and tended to provide a certain village centered sense of security. It was a world view oriented to the worst case scenario of hard times of drought, famine, pestilence, warfare and disease.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The peasant has never been an entirely independent spirit, though he/she may have had strongly independent value orientations, they were inevitably feeding or paying taxes to some one else.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Hard times are returning again and for the most part the important people have forgotten how best to cope with them. The critical difference between the village bound local world view and the earthbound global world view is the scale and scope of the significance of the terms, the peasant is no longer safe in his village, nor is the bureaucrat necessarily any better off.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A world of diminishing good has certain theoretical and philosophical implications of attitude and adaptation. A negative sum game means that the no matter how well it is played, surplus gains will entail net overall loss. A zero sum game pits two opponents against one another in a very primitive way--neither mutual competition nor dominance of either one over the other eventuates in gain--only mutual cooperation begets success. In an earthbound world, the strategy to be adopted in one of minimizing losses through minimizing gains, rather than optimizing or maximizing gains through minimization of losses. Rather than a conservative outlook, the predominate perspective will be one based upon the principle of 'rationing' of limited, irreplaceable commodities in order that they may be preserved for as long as possible. This leads to a world of 'restricted good' based upon principles of preservation and prevention. Rationing strategies will be diverse given various local circumstances and will lead to patterns of local hoarding, panic and to strategies of diversification as the number of alternative resources, no matter how basic or inefficient, become substituted in a world of scarcity. It will become a world of increasingly widespread deprivation, socio economic regression and extreme political economic polarization which will tear asunder the world middle class and increasingly marginalize the bureaucracy upon which it has been founded and flourished. Hoarding will be followed by increasing incidences of 'raiding' which will in turn generate a vicious cycle of revenge and punishment and 'feuding'. Social movements of all imaginable kinds will proliferate in confrontation with increasing authoritarian power structures which will attempt to preserve the status quo of extreme polarization, a minimal regressed form of social structure. In an earthbound world of diminishing good, there will be no point in leveling on a global scale, as there will be nothing to level and no amount of resources sufficient to distribute evenly throughout the world.</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">PAN-HUMANESS</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></font></b></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the real world, might has always been made right. The powerful conquer the weak and superimpose their own sense of values, civilization, history and ideology upon the cultures of the conquered. This has been the hard learned political lesson of human history. It is a lesson sometimes difficult to understand because it is usually the memory of the dominant culture which survives, while the many other cultures are soon forgotten. And when looked at from the standpoint of a dominant culture, it is hard not to believe that one's own values, civilization, history and ideology is indeed morally justified and inherently correct--of living the illusion that right made right.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Another difficult lesson anthropology teaches us is that in the world of human reality, people are neither good nor bad, right nor wrong. There is indeed evil in the world which is perpetrated by people, but the people themselves rarely if ever act with the deliberate purpose of being evil or wrong, except as rare perversions of nature. Even many criminals act within a narrowly rationalized world view of their own legitimacy of being. People and their parties may make many mistakes, or be misguided down the wrong path by some sick or selfish power mongers, but they always usually act within a moral and semi-rational world view which construes their behavior as morally legitimate and proper. Evil is largely a consequence but rarely a cause, in the world of humankind. People are just people, doing what people have always done. The lesson learned by anthropology that there is no right or wrong in the world, but many small rights and wrongs, is perhaps the hardest lesson to be learned, but from the standpoint of a value free science based upon the observation of human behavior, it is a necessary one.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the metaphysical world of philosophers there is right and wrong in human reality, if in name only, regardless of the lessons of history and anthropology. The real world may burn their books, imprison them to silence their words, or put bullets in the back of their heads, but philosophers will still argue their case for a moral bottom line in the human world. Human existence and behavior will always pose basic moral and ethical dilemmas, whatever the vagaries of power in history or the realities of people in anthropology. Philosophers are not only arguing for the legitimacy of right versus wrong in the human world, if in name only, but they are also fighting for the general relevancy of their own metaphysical orientation and for the primacy of philosophy in the historical or anthropological lessons of humankind. They are in a sense defending their own legitimacy and sense of morality in the world, and though the world may never prove them right, it also can never prove them wrong, either,</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Politicians follow the path of power and tend to deal with people as if they were the objects of power, to be controlled and manipulated. Anthropologists follow the path of science and deal with people as behavioral entities for scientific inquiry and for the elucidation of scientific principles. Philosophers follow the path of wisdom, and see human beings as the bearers of knowledge and understanding. Philosophers see that human existence is frequently challenged by moral dilemmas which have no simple scientific solutions or political resolutions. They see that human being is a wise being, whose reality is always complicated by questions, paradoxes and contradictions which demand responses. The problems of philosophy, they claim, come before problems of science or power, because it guides the many choices that people must make, from their world view and attitudes toward reality and predetermines the different directions we eventually follow. The path of philosophy can lead to wisdom and enlightenment and can eventuate in a better world if its way is correct and clear.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Wise human beings live in realities bound by their mind, and formed by the abstract relations of words and their many meanings--it is this life of the mind as expressed by words from the mouth which makes humankind unique in nature and especially problematic from a philosophical point of view. We cannot simply be studied as if we were rocks in the ground or manipulated or controlled as if we were mere brute beasts of burden.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To defend themselves, primarily from themselves, philosophers have adopted a position called 'meta-ethical'--they can study ethic from a disinterested and distant stance that is purported beyond the involvement with ethics. They study different ethical systems and moral philosophies in order to understand how, why and what it is they say, to ferret out all the possible implications and inferences and to try to construct various counter arguments in its critique, but as philosophers, they do not adopt moral stances either for or against any particular kind of normative orientation, or seek to judge systems in a prescriptive way. In this they are not too different from anthropologists, except that they deal with systems of words and their meta-relations, where as anthropologists as scientists purport to study systems of people, their behavior and their values in a naturalistic way.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A meta-ethical position is necessary for philosophers as it gives them a handle on possible truths which are non-relative from the standpoint of either power or values. Meta-ethics provides them a means for addressing the problematics of a universal normative system, or set of values which can be claimed to be applicable for all people, in all cultures and in all time, regardless of the relativity of power or values.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Philosophy remains important in our human world, for if its path of wisdom is followed long enough and pursued hard enough, it will eventually lead us in the right direction, which we would never find without it, and being irredeemably wise, we could never rest easy unless we looked for it.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Justification of a world order of humankind has always depended upon a political ethical philosophy which successfully proposes a valid meta-ethical argument of what is pan humanly good and right. Such a philosophy has always had other important metaphysical and ontological ramifications--economic, social, educational, scientific, religious, political, legal--much of which has been frequently left on its own. Such meta-ethical argument has always had to confront and has yet failed to successfully resolve certain fundamental dilemmas of rational truth versus empirical relativism which are inextricably bound up with what it means to be human in the world. Such final justification depends ultimately upon our collective definition of 'pan humanness'--what is universally means to be human in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">No world order which lacks such meta-ethical justification or which is based upon false or erroneous political ethical philosophy, can claim such legitimacy which has non-ideological, ontological status in the world. Discovery and elaboration of 'pan humanness' as a meta-ethical set of organizing values and universal philosophical principles which are non-ideological leads to the question of what is genuinely, fundamentally universal about human identity in the world which could claim the status of 'pan humanness'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can find evidence of a pan human identity in certain natural traits and needs shared by all members of a common biological species. We find a common capacity for linguistic competence and evidence for the psychic unity of humankind along emotional, symbolic, mythological and rational aspects. But none of these are adequate for the purpose of a universal meta-ethical orientation, for these innate universals also comprehend a tremendous amount of difference and variation, and none provide the necessary linkage to explain that while humanity has the capacity for good and right, it also so often fails to realize this capacity. With ethical questions, people have choices to make, in regard to natural characteristics, they have no choice.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The necessary linkage is the human conception of the ideal of human equality--that in theory and in practice all people are treated equally and have the same basic human responsibilities. Humankind shares the same basic humanitarian ideal of human equality, which applies to every individual regardless of basic differences between people. The value of Homo equus forms the ground for a meta-ethical orientation which is pan human and which is non-ideological in status.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Recognition of this potential equality underlies our natural human identity as a member of common humankind--in that we recognize in other people the same basic natural traits, needs and capacities, that we find within ourselves, constituting our common ground for being, and this allows us a choice between acknowledging differences or sameness between human beings and with the affirmation of sameness, we get by extension ideal equality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But posing human equality as the ground for a universal meta-ethic creates more problems philosophically that it solves, and having posed it, now it must be proven, philosophically at least, if not politically and anthropologically.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Human equality underlies the philosophical legitimization of universal human rights as the universal normative framework upon which to establish global order, and it is in the understanding of both human equality and human rights as necessary universals that we arrive at a more complete comprehension of pan humanness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Human rights remains mostly misunderstood, and there is a convenient kind of power to usurp and violate them derived from such common misunderstanding. For the most part, the values of human rights remains itself contextual and implicit, always lurking in the background of critical attention which tends always to focus upon the immediate conflicts and events of their instantiation or violation--thus they are largely construed indirectly as something to be inferred in relation to other things more concretely and directly evident. But the doctrine of these values demands explication as something more important in and of itself.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The original formulation of human rights requires substantial revision largely because the cultural and conceptual context of their realization and violation has changed dramatically. These changes have led to new kinds of rights and new situations, to new ways of realization and new methods for their violation and to a great extent the rethinking of the original formulations have not been able to keep up with such substantive alterations of the environments of their realization and violation. This has led to the erosion and subversion of these rights in many areas of daily living because the forces and powers based upon their violation and usurpation are constantly, deliberately plotting new methods. Human rights are things and values which always need to be protected, because they are always many people who are trying to take them away. Whole socio political economic structures have arisen in our modern age based primarily upon the kind of power derived from the forceful violation, persuasive subversion and manipulative usurpation of such contexts.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is important to distinguish between basic or primary human rights, and derivative or secondary human rights: the former are the set of core values defining what the principle basis of all human rights are supposed to be, while the latter are those innumerable sets of rules or unspoken agreements based upon the instantiation and adjudication of the basic rights in social life--the contextual extension of these basic rights into everyday life ways. It is the latter set of derivative rights which are primarily the ledger main of lawyers legalese and judiciary arbitrariness. The secondary rights alter as the conditions and contexts of realization and violation change, while the basic rights tend to remain relatively constant.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This is the distinguishing difference between rights considered basic and derivative. Primary rights are general and relatively unchanging, therefore largely rational and orienting in their expression: secondary rights are specific and alterable, context dependent and largely empirically exemplifying in their pragmatic instrumentality--the former set are few and restrictive in definition, the latter many and inclusive. Thus it make sense that if we wish to usurp the power of rights that we direct attention away from the explicit definition of the former and focus attention toward the demonstration of the latter, ignoring the implicitness of both in relation to one another and in relation to the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The basic rights are considered universally inviolable and in this sense absolute, but the derivative rights are violable and therefore relative to the contextuality of their interpretation. It is in fact the violability of the derivative rights that the pervasive failure of the realization of human rights, and of their contexts of understanding, are to be found. We may unreservedly condemn a tyrant who flagrantly violates the basic rights of others by torture, execution, imprisonment, and so on, but at the same time we may whole- heartedly uphold the interests of corporations or powerful individuals that chronically and massively manipulate and usurp many derivative rights in order to maximize their profits or promote their powers. And in upholding this usurpation we will say we are protecting their 'corporate' rights and prerogatives.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">another important distinction is between true or genuine rights, quasi-or semi-rights or spurious rights, and false, pretentious or hypocritical rights of convenience, or 'un-rights'. We may refer to the latter set as privileges, prerogatives, license derived from power, political economic interests and the irresponsible freedoms and pursuit of 'pleasures'. Such spurious rights will masquerade as the former genuine rights as long as it serves the interests of private individuals or special interest groups to do so. Those rights exist in the gray areas of context between the realization and violation of human rights.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">All basic human rights and all true human rights are always and only individually oriented. Their enunciation is the only protection which the individual has against the whimsical social ethos of the group--they are the only guarantee of individual autonomy of will and independence of thought and action. They are the only things coming between the freedom of the individual and the anarchy of the masses or the tyranny of the few.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Groups and collectivities, at whatever level, from the local through the national or regional to the global, derive their moral charter and legitimacy from the recognition and protection of these basic, genuine human rights. Secondary rights pertaining to such collectivities as separate entities are based upon the 'domestic analogy' of the basic rights of the individual--they are treated as if they were separate, individual entities with basic rights--and these corporate groupings ultimately derive their normative and moral charter from the consensus of its individual constituency and from the need for the protection of individual rights and freedoms. This is the source of the moral charter of corporate organization, power and authority and is the exclusive basis of the derivation of their secondary rights.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Though national constitutions may pay lip service to this charter for protection and guarantee of these rights, and may even sometimes instrumentally uphold its charter, no nation has the justifiable privilege or moral mandate to ignore or violate these rights, whatever the circumstances or occasion of their demonstration.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This maxim stands absolutely and grounds the values of human rights in the fundamental meta-ethic of human equality. This includes any manner of violation, whether for 'national security' or national interest. And what is correct at the national level is correct at the international and global levels as well, and throughout the hierarchy of political organization. No alliance of nations, no province or state or municipality, no matter how democratically constituted, may ignore or neglect these basic rights without forfeiting in the process their moral charter, their 'derived' right to rule. Rights and powers of organizations at all levels are derived from the charter of basic human rights--they either protect and guarantee these rights or fail to, but they do not grant them, privilege them, appropriate them or authorize them from above.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We may say that all individuals and all social collectivities are absolutely subject to the 'moral imperative' of human rights.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To a large extent derivative rights are concerned with the power and relations of social collectivities in relation to the individual. So, too, spurious rights and un-rights stem from the arbitrary powers of social collectivities or authorities to arrest and suspend genuine rights, or to modify them contextually in the name of or for the sake of organizational interest or security. It is at these rarefied levels of power, so above and beyond the everyday vision and interests of most people, that such gray areas of power and privilege come into existence, that genuine rights become invisible, acquiring their characteristic social invisibility or silence, and that derived or spurious rights, in their demonstration, become transparent or reified behind the illusive veil of power. We may refer to the characteristic invisibility of basic rights, the reflective transparency of derivative rights, and the reified, hypostatized illusion of spurious rights.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Spurious and un-rights of organizations do not stem directly from the misappropriation of the basic and genuine rights of the individual, but are only indirectly immanent from this moral ground of human reality. They derive from the derivative and spurious rights situated in everyday relations between actors and collectively and cumulatively, from the personal relationships and social networks of interdependency. Rights and their expressions involved in and governing interpersonal relationships, like organizational rights, are always derivative and never basic. The difference between these social interpersonal and organizationally derived rights are that the former are directly derivative while the latter are always indirectly derivative. It is possible to say that spurious rights in both contexts, are always coincidentally derivative or superimposed by authority and that un-rights are underivative.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is important to recognize that indirectly derivative rights arise from the need to govern and manage correctly the relations between people and to deal with the situations which arise incidentally as conflicts of interest between people which bring the problem to the realization of basic rights into question. In fact all indirectly derivative rights may be summarily reduced to and explained in terms of directly derivative rights between individuals and the interpersonal contexts of their expression. In this way we may say that nomos is derived from ethos and that legal and political institutions are derived from the cultural realities in their articulating and expression. Indirectly derivative and spurious rights always imply or entails some form of direct instantiation in the realization or violation of individual rights in interpersonal contexts.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The immediate concern is not the elucidation of derivative rights, as these carry us away from the more pressing moral issues and lead us down the thickly wooded path of descriptive and prescriptive legal paradigms. The important focus is upon the sense of fundamentality of the basic rights as they are primarily situated in the existentially of the individual actor and the interpersonal ethos of face to face social life, and in the moral imperative this entails for all human social life. It allows a more precise understanding of the role of cultural and conceptual contextuality in the expression, realization and violation of these rights.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If directly derived rights provide the ground for the explanation and justification of indirectly derived rights and spurious rights, then they also provide the primary cultural and conceptual context for the instantiation and validation of the basic rights. They situate the fundamentality and moral imperative of basic human rights in the everyday relations between people. And it is in understanding of this 'situating' effect of directly derivative rights that the philosophical, meta-ethical comprehension and justification for human rights as a universal ideological and moral doctrine is to be found.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The doctrine of fundamental human rights is designed to protect the needs, interests and independence of the individual in relation to other people and in relation to the social contracts and charters between them. The design of basic rights is to ensure the autonomous willpower of the individual--his/her freedom to think, speak and act relatively independently from the constraints of others. This is the guarantee of the normative freedom of the individual's independent judgment, rationality and decision making capabilities. Liberty is what we refer to as the 'emancipation' from social constraint and social power.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But the social reality of human existence inevitably entails that the freedom of one individual must always be balanced against and weighed by the relative freedom of all other individuals. In other words, freedom in the normative sense is not unrestricted and absolute, but is morally bound by the freedom, or potential un-freedom of all other individuals. The normative freedom of one individual is guaranteed as long as its realization does not involve the violation of other people's freedom. From this follow the moral imperative of human rights, the sense of normative responsibility the individual has toward all other individuals (and the collectivity, as 'individual' has towards all other 'individuals'). This normative responsibility and its moral imperative provide the charter for indirectly derivative rights and powers.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the same way that we refer to a fundamental set of basic human rights, we may also refer to a corresponding set of basic human responsibilities not to violate these rights of others in the realization of their own freedoms. Such basic responsibilities are not 'unfreedom' of arbitrary social constraint. Indeed we have a responsibility to protect and promote freedom. These are the basis for fundamental moral codices in society. We may also refer to the critical difference between the responsibility to exercise one's own rights in the realization of one's own fundamental normative freedom, and in the sense of freedom from responsibility which determines the moral boundaries of our rights. It demarcates the difference between liberty and license. We may also refer to the basic 'unfreedom' which is inherent in the violation of human rights and responsibilities. In the same way that we may distinguish between basic and derived, genuine, spurious and un-rights, and directly and indirectly derived rights, so also may we refer to corresponding kinds of basic, derived, spurious, direct and indirect human responsibilities.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If basic human rights remain consistently unlearned and misunderstood, as we are consistently, habitually taught how to 'unthink' rights in relation to social sanctions and powers, so also basic human rights remains even more poorly understood and less well recognized. Our normative responsibility to ourselves in the realization of our own rights, and to all of humankind in the protection of their rights and common well being and the critical connection between the individual and universal levels of context, is intervened and interfered with by the indoctrination and inculcation of spurious responsibilities and unfreedoms by group bounded norms and narrow cultural traditions. Chauvinism, patriotism, blind loyalty to the collective, in-group/out-group prejudice, are all part and parcel of the ideological propaganda campaign to unthink ourselves out of our basic responsibilities to all of humankind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From the very beginning of our formal education to the end, from flag salutes and daily pledges of allegiance to prayer readings and organized team sports to rallying around the high school totem mascot, to the professional politics of evaluating papers, class grades and granting diplomas and the guild mentality of professional clicks and elites, we are taught and programmed to be responsible to everything and everybody including the almighty clock, the bell, the whistle, the schedule, the syllabus and the deadline, except to ourselves and the whole of humankind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The cultural and conceptual context appropriates for the realization of human rights and responsibilities constrains a kind of socio-political ethos which may best be loosely described ad 'democracy'. To the extent that basic human responsibilities entails a non-violent and honest orientation, and to the extent that politics based upon the culturally relative model of 'might makes right' is inherently corrupting and evil, then such commitment constrains a kind of a-political attitude which may well be referred to as 'social anarchy' without the necessary negative connotations of the tyranny of disorder and absolute chaos. To the extent that human rights protects human freedom, government by consent is demanded, and to the extent that educational institutions can successfully inculcate the individual in a firm sense of basic human responsibilities, an acephalous, anarchical socio-political order is resulting. In other words, a participatorial and self organizing political order can be envisioned in the kind of cultural and conceptual contexts of the realization of human rights and responsibilities,, based upon the minimization of the function of political control, military coercion and fascist discipline.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Human rights and responsibilities become balanced in the scales of justice, and this balancing provides the ultimate framework for the understanding of the doctrine of human equality, the normative scaffolding for the meta-ethical justification of pan-humanness in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our sense of justice may be separated into what be referred to as 'natural justice' and 'social justice'. Natural justice arises from the natural constraints imposed upon human existence as these are manifest in terms of basic human needs. Natural needs may be referred to as those limitations or requirements which guarantee the sustenance of a health and human well being. There has been with the progressive development of convenience a corresponding 'need' inflation--people now 'need' cars to drive to work in to earn the 'money' they need to live upon, and they 'need' gas to fuel their cars. People also need fresh air to breath, clean water to drink, and nutritious food to eat.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the same sense that we may distinguish between primary and derivative and genuine and spurious 'needs'. Needless to say our inflation of needs occasions the multiplication of many falsehoods, delusions, addictions and greed. Social justice arises in relation to the exercise of human freedoms and responsibilities as these realize or fail to realize the natural justice of basic human needs. Social justice can be seen as derivative of natural justice and in its derivation becomes complicated by a great deal of need inflation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Basic human needs has always remained the same, so has the fundamental sense of natural justice relating to these needs remained essentially unchanged, but the context of the instantiation of these needs in directly derivative terms of interpersonal human relations has changed dramatically and our thinking upon the problem has not kept pace. Directly derivative social justice demands sufficient welfare--the common well being of the individual and of all of humankind should be one of the principle social and individual concerns. It too has a force of a basic normative injunction on human existence and a moral imperative to collective social action, but this primary concern has been largely vitiated by partisan politics and private special interest groups.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But why justice and why human rights and why freedom, that all these should constitute the moral ground and universal ethic for humankind? In other words, how shall we argue the case for the philosophical justification of this value orientation over any other plausible meta-ethical orientation towards a normative human reality. So far, most of the argument presented has been tautological without an convincing substantive argument, in favor of our acceptance of such a position.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The discussion of human freedom as a basic precondition of a moral human existence seems to fly in the face of many social science orientations, to contradict the doctrine of ethical and cultural relativism and is itself culturally and ideologically rooted in a kind of value orientation which defines freedom as a necessary good and a basic prerequisite of 'the pursuit of happiness'. It is in itself a relative value orientation, so how can it be used as a meta-ethical, trans-cultural and pan human foundation for a normative universal. Not all cultures value human freedoms equally and most of humanity seems quite content to compromise their basic freedoms for a sense of group security.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The doctrine of human rights is itself, like the doctrines of pacifism and non-violence, rooted in heterogeneous hermeneutical traditions which have been themselves culturally and historically situated. But ideological systems accrete meaning and become detached from their origins, gaining a life of their own, independent of tradition. Such systems become organizational in their function, orienting the collective mind. They develop their own conceptual contexts for their understanding beyond any particular cultural tradition.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">As such they 'stand for themselves' as symbol systems and create their own meanings outside of cultural contexts or historical influences. Science is such a symbolic system, though its primary and ultimate referents are always natural phenomena. But science does not seek philosophical or epistemological justification though philosophers of science attempt such an understanding. It finds its own justification exclusively in the sufficiency of its explanations of natural phenomena. Similar kinds of sufficiency arguments may be applied to such philosophical religious orientations as human rights and pacifism. They go beyond mere ideology or tautological systems of rationalization in their ability to consistently explain what 'happens' empirically in reference to other 'empirical happenings.'</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Thus it is possible to imagine a kind of normative 'science' which sufficiently and successfully, 'correctly' explains events in reference to other events and 'meta-relations' between such events. A good argument can be made that all social science can be construed as 'normative' in orientation to the extent that it concerns human social relations between rational, decision making individuals and ad 'scientific' to the extent that it is concerned with human behavioral reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But all this still begs the question of a valid meta-ethical argument for presuming human rights to be fundamental and normatively universal in human reality. At first glance there seems little in the 'nature' of humankind that can be given as an a-priori or sufficient ground for such an argument. Indeed, the original natural human may in fact have been brutal, selfish and short. A good case has been made for natural human aggression explaining innately violent social tendencies. Then why must we necessarily presume a 'moral imperative' of superimposing regime of human rights over an original reality of need, greed and seed. Most anthropological, sociological and psychological evidence would seem to contradict such a presupposition.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The philosophical justification for the sense of natural justice and a natural moral imperative for normative freedom, rather than a science of natural order and the evolutionary imperative of the law of natural selection, can be found in the 'psychic unity of humankind' which posits that all people are potentially 'sentient' which endows us with a 'spiritual potentiality' of equality. The quality and character of human cognition, of Homo sapience as the 'sentient human being' is the distinguishing mark of human reality setting it apart from other life forms and allowing for human culture. While basic needs may be more or less the same, not all human beings are born equal. We recognize the ideal of the spiritual equality of humankind as a possible goal yet unrealized, as an ideal worthy of our attention and emulation. We do not deprive people of their human rights or basic equality in spirit because there are natural differences in abilities or talents. We do not deprive them of the benefit of a sacred 'soul of humanness' which characterizes the belief in the spiritual equality of humankind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Innate human sentience is regarded as what defines unique human identity, whether individually or collectively in terms of 'pan-humanness'. It set humankind, and the human being, apart as something special in the natural order. It is a fundamental symbol of the self which applies individually to the collective identity of humankind, forming the basis of what we refer to as 'common humanity'. Its recognition, however implicit, is the beginning of the development of a fundamental religious spirituality distilled from so much ideological dogma, myth and superstition. It is the source of our common humanity or human identity, the beginning of our collective emancipation from the bonds of nature, and our means of coming to terms with or own 'hearts of darkness'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The appeal to human sentience, the psychic unity of humankind and the spiritual equality of humanity work together in other ways to justify our sense of the primary philosophical importance of the doctrine of human rights, and so much meta-ethical justification is not as straight forward as it is made to seem.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our sense of justice depends upon a notion of 'equality' however relative or absolute. Thus we regularly refer to values of 'social equality' or 'political equality' or equality of opportunity or educational equality or ideological equality without really explicitly understanding what we really mean. We frequently grant one kind of 'equality' while revoking other kinds--any way we slice the pie we can be accused of discrimination. It is in a world of relative inequality that we find the need to establish ideals of 'equality in spirit'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our sense of justice entails a notion of 'fair play' even if in a poetic sense of 'an eye for an eye' or of revenge. Death is called the great equalizer. Western witchcraft believes in 'three fold retribution'. In all these there is a sense of 'fairness' in human relations and the need to restore such a state when conditions turn awry. Such a state of the need for fairness in social relations is related to values of harmony, mutual reciprocity, peaceful coexistence etc.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">'Fairness' related to our notions of equality in terms of 'evenness' and the consequent need to 'get even'. Equality comes from the Latin 'equs' meaning 'flat' or even. Equality refers to a state of flatness or evenness in social relations when there are no outstanding disparities between persons or parties in their basic conditions, expectations or relations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Rarely do we expect or get exact or true equality in any absolute sense. It is usually relative to some standard of measurement, more or less or approximate. Only ideologically do we refer to 'human equality' as being in some sense absolute and non-relative to all contexts, and this is our notion of universal 'spiritual equality of humankind'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">When attributing justice to our world, we are attributing qualities and states or conditions to others, which we recognize as being relatively present or absent in ourselves. We are behaving normatively in our judging and judgment of human relations, and in this we express our rationality and our sentience. Our sentience allows us the possibility of stepping outside or ourselves, of imagining a separate, sentient soul apart from our corporeal being. In this we can imagine ourselves in different states of being other than what we really are, and we can see ourselves in others and find others within us. A refined sense of the primitive justice of 'an eye for an eye' is 'do unto others as you would have others do unto you'. Even more subtly is the mandate 'do not do unto others what you would not want them to do unto you'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This sense of natural and social justice and the normative need for establishing relative equality are fundamental aspects of our normative reason, and constitute the basis of basic normative human needs in the restoration of social order and realignment of the social with the natural world. It resides in our ability to live vicariously in other people's shoes, to imagine ourselves in their condition and to wish upon other what we will. Even more importantly, it resides in our ability to recognize that what happens to others might possibly happen to ourselves.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">One of the most convincing reasons given for the position of holding human rights absolute and inviolable and for attributing them universally to humankind with exception in our ability to recognize that if we allow the violation of a right in a single instance, we create a ground of precedence for the possibility of its violation in all instances. And if we deny them to any one individual, however inept or criminal, then we acknowledge the possibility for denying them to all individuals, especially to ourselves. And this peculiar quality of human sentience to imagine ourselves as others and others as ourselves is what identifies us in a pan-human state of being and allows us to imagine a universal brotherhood (and sisterhood) and to posit the need for universal equality and common justice.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But upon an even deeper level of our collective unconscious, our sentience allows us to understand our own heart of darkness and to recognize it in others. We seen in the possible evilness of all people our own possibility for evil, injustice and violence and or own ability to make normative mistakes and misjudgments. It resides in our recognition of evil for what it is and for its possibility of what it can become. In our ability to understand human evil, we also recognize the need to restore the balance and try to prevent possible future imbalance. Thus it is because we are potentially evil, that we must become potentially equal. It is because there is injustice in the world that we must keep ideals of human rights and justice.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">So we must foster forgiveness over vengeance, compassion over retribution, tolerance over punishment and we do not categorically condemn every breach of our pan human moral imperative or every violation of a human right. Indeed our collective history as been one largely composed of such massive breaches and mass violations. The progress of human emancipation has not been based upon the principle of violence begetting more violence. We strive not to indiscriminate but to enlighten and emancipate.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is from the sentience of humankind that comes our common sense of justice and the ideal of spiritual equality which unites us existentially and morally against the realities of relative inequality and injustice. It allows us to recognize in the law of nature the tyrannies of necessity, in the reign of power, the relative evil of might makes right and the moral tyranny of fear and the threat of violent force and in the chaos of lawless irresponsibility the tyranny of chaos. In this alone we recognize the meta-ethical justification for positing human rights and their realization as a universal moral injunction.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Though this argument must stand alone, not needing meta-ethical justification in terms of any other condition or natural state, it does have a more interesting explanation in terms of what human sentience is naturally and exactly how it related to the need for human rights.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A keystone has been missing from our meta-ethical edifice--individual freedom as the basis for human rights has not yet been sufficiently explained. Why is the granting and guaranteeing of normative freedom and independence necessary for the realization of human rights?</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The answer lies in the natural reality of individual human differences and in the dilemma posed by the fact of individual uniqueness of identity and personality. The fact of individual human differences arises from the relativity of human existence--relativeness of equality, of needs, of conditions, of contexts and values. Relative and reflexive recognition of individual human differences creates a sense of individual uniqueness which we value as spiritually sacred and inviolable to our sense of human identity in the world. But this relativeness of individuality poses a grand paradox underlying the existential problematics of human social realities--our common sentience allows us to recognize a natural relationship to humankind. We also hold as sacred this identification with the common body of humanity. It leads is to posit an 'equality in spirit' if not in fact, which we then regard as inviolably sacred. The answer to this fundamental existential dilemma is that the inviolable sanctity of the human soul and the 'equality in spirit' of all humankind are one and the same things--the opposite manifestations of the same source of natural human sentience to recognize difference and sameness--this is the need for normative freedom and independent willpower.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The need for normative freedom is demanded by our natural sentience. Human beings are all equally unique and equally different in spirit. And this we hold as inviolably sacred. The expression of these differences and fulfillment of this sense of uniqueness demands a maximization of normative freedom in our social relations. Though there are common sameness of being and universal human traits, human beings are not all the same and should not be constrained to be all the same. Normative freedom is a necessity because it is prerequisite to the realization of these differences and uniqueness of individual personality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The distinctive characteristic of our sentience is our ability to imagine--to imagine ourselves as self, as others, to imagine other possibilities, to live vicariously and symbolically, to see ourselves as unique, separate and as sacred and as simultaneously the same and united and yet sacred. We are able to imagine alternative traits, attributes, conditions and states in ourselves and in others, and to allow this imagination to be the guide for our actions, and our 'instantiations' of such possibilities. Our imagination allows us to sense discrepancy, to fill gaps in our understanding and to make inferences and judgments about our reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Successful cultivation of such imagination, the so called 'open mind' requires relative normative freedom from overburdening social constraints. It requires the private freedom to decide right from wrong, good from bad, better from worse, in our everyday thoughts and actions and to explore options, possibilities in our everyday choices and most of all, freedom to make and correct mistakes. The exercise of our normative freedom allows us the opportunity to test our evaluations of the world and to learn by the wisdom of our choices. It also entails allowing others the same kind of normative freedom.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In every case, violation of human rights entails directly or indirectly some kind of social constraining force, whether active or passive, external or internal, upon an individual's normative freedom. Such constraining forces which so impinge upon our existence in the debilitation of the individual's normative capacity to act autonomously and therefor responsibly.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The innate, natural normative capacity of human sentience accounts for the distinctive characterizing trait of pan-humanness called creativity. Definitions of creativity embody operationally regular behavioral phenomena which is amenable to scientific method. It is 'self-organizing' and 'pattern generating' behavior of the imagination at the border of chaos. The vitality and adaptability of our common and collective creativity depends upon the cultural realization of normative freedom as a necessary and sufficient precondition. It defines the human capacity as a culture bearing, culture inventing 'creature', allowing the unique human ability to create culture and for the creation of alternative conditions for the realization of human possibility. Providing the kind of cultural and conceptual contexts required for the cultivation of individual creative capacities through the optimization of normative freedom is the essence of a common education for collective emancipation and enlightenment.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This argument successfully resolves the dilemmas of cultural relativism which so far has prevented philosophical meta-ethics from constructing a universal normative system. Cultural relativism posits an irreducible relativeness of value orientations embedded in differing cultural contexts. This leads to the realization that there can therefore be no single correct system of values immanent or a-priori in human reality which may apply equally well in all cultural situations. It also leads to the further realization that, in fact, in our collective history, 'might makes right' and whomever has the power to constrain and change people's lives, therefore has the power to refashion and reconstruct cultural values. This is an historical reality founded in empirical fact which no amount of ideological truth or philosophical rationalization can undo. Understanding the realities of human moral existence therefore depends scientifically upon understanding the realities and meanings of social power and undermines any argument to establish a universal meta-ethical system for humankind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But a genuinely meta-ethical approach, being both 'beyond ethics' and of and about 'ethics' need not be inimical to the realities of power and cultural relativity. To be effective our meta-physical rationalizations must effectively deal with the dilemmas of the real world and effectively overcoming the 'paradox' of cultural relativism is the principle purpose and problem of any realistic and reasonable meta-ethical argument. Cultural relativism is properly interpreted provides the solution to our meta-ethical dilemma.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If wholeheartedly and unreservedly embraces, cultural relativism demands that we account for differences of cultural context in the justification of our normative systems. Cultural differences are a contextual and social derivation of individual differences, the reality of the former is dependent upon and a function of the realization of the latter. Similarly, uniqueness of cultural orientation is derived from the reality of individual uniqueness. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that to the extent individual differences and uniqueness demands a context of normative freedom, cultural differences and uniqueness of context require as well a relative freedom for its expression. It follows that part of the problematic of collective emancipation is the recognition and cultivation of cultural differences and the reality of cultural multiplicity, as this is essential to the context for the development of collective human freedom.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This argument is similar to the one which distinguishes basic and genuine human rights from derivative and spurious rights. We may say that cultural freedom is contextually derivative of individual normative freedom, and we may refer to a derivative kind of cultural creativity as well. Both individual freedom and creativity and cultural contextual freedom and creativity are directly manifest in interpersonal social relations and can be explained and expressed in terms of such relations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But there is an important limiting qualification to this argument in defense of cultural relativity of values. Where individual freedom is held as inviolable and absolute, and leads rationally to the need for enculturation of human responsibility, cultural freedom is always relative and subject to constraining violations and results in the need for collective social limitations and sanctions. The realization of human rights demands a cultural and conceptual context and the relative nature of this realization provides the acceptable parameters for defining this cultural and conceptual context.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In other words, cultural freedom and difference is allowable and preferable as long as it promoted the realization of human rights or at least does not constrain such realization. But when its realization eventuates in the violation of human rights or in the constraining of the basic freedoms upon which these rights are based, then the cultural freedoms and differences are no longer morally sustainable.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The paradox of cultural relativism is rooted in the same existential paradox of individualism and the solutions are the same as well. Recognition of the pan-human identity of both individuals and cultures in terms which are regarded as inviolably sacred--equality of people and of cultures--are found in the realities of differences and relative inequalities between both individuals and cultures. Both lead to the same sense of basic human responsibility and the same kind of universal moral injunction of human rights. Cultural freedom and difference is regarded as sacred as long as it does not violate its own inviolability based upon the absolute character of individual freedom and rights--cultural context is always relative to individual difference. These define the natural and social parameters of human freedom and responsibility, both individually and culturally.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The difference between a cultural orientation which sustains or cultivates individual normative freedom and one which leads to its neglect or violation is similar to the difference between genuine and spurious human rights and responsibilities. In this way we may refer to a genuine cultural orientation as opposed to a spurious one based upon the above distinction.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To say that all people are equal in spirit or that all cultures are equal in values, is not to say that people may do whatever pleases them or that cultures may acceptably violate human rights, nor is it to necessarily deny the realities that not all people are created equal and not all cultures share the same, or even similar sets of values. Cultural relativism, as an empirical reality or as an ideological doctrine, and the doctrine of human rights as a meta-ethical philosophy, are not necessarily inimical or irreconcilable but are in fact mutually necessary and concomitant in the understanding of human rights and the problematics of their existential realization. Nor does the fact that most cultures throughout most of human history and prehistory have chronically and habitually, customarily and traditionally violated human rights en masse require us to deny these doctrines as unjustifiable or unrealistic. Recognition of inviolability does not depend upon the knowledge of its chronic violation, just as an infinite number of wrongs do not make a right or an infinite number of false incidences cannot prove a truth.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There remain real and important reasons why we regard such values as inviolable and universally absolute, reasons which transcend the facts of their disproof. The fact is that it is in our very recognition of evil for what it is, in our very ability to recognize violence as the violation of human rights and values of non-violence as promoting human rights, that we can in our sentience and normative independence acknowledge the tyranny of power and necessity and anarchy and can imagine better worlds with such tyranny, that leads us to universally value the pan human realization of such possibilities of human equality and freedom. Our very recognition of the critical difference between possible right and actual wrong, between good and evil, even as only an imagined potentiality of human spirit, creates the very ground for our meta-ethical justification. Our sense of justice is not only rooted in our cultural values, but also in the recognition of evil in the world of evil and in the possibility of human good.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In giving a name to human rights and in situating them in reference to cultural values, human sentience and the natural need for normative freedom, and in locating them in intellectual terrain in reference to related value orientations we have also given a name and an identity to human evil.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mete-ethical justification for the moral imperative of human rights is neither self evident nor amenable to common sense rooted in relative values and folk psychology. We must learn the wisdom of the way of the human equality and freedom--we are not naturally born with it except in spirit and potentiality. Human rights are held sacred in their function of identifying the uniqueness and value of human individuality in relation to all of humanity. They are held absolute in the sense of also being absolutely inviolable. Their sacredness defines our basic humanity and our basic human identity. They also serve as a counter reference by which to define our inhumanity. We find that their moral justification in the recognition of the evil that attends their failure and in our resulting need to resist and counteract this violence. In their realization we refer to what is basic and genuine as contrasted with what is derivative and spurious, knowing that its understanding is always relative to cultural and conceptual contextuality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is in the day to day derivation of these basic values that the possibility for their violation comes into play in interpersonal social relations. We justify the moral imperative in our sentience, our imagination, our sense of justice and on our compassion for suffering and understanding of the humanness of evil. We find its ground in our common heart of darkness--the ability to recognize within ourselves the possibility of our own evil and the subsequent need to come to terms with and conquer this sense of darkness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Notions of freedom and responsibility, justice and equality, needs and social constraints, all come into play in the elucidation of the meta-ethical basis for human rights.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We accept the call and charter of the moral imperative of human rights as the price we pay for identity with common humanity and citizenship to humankind, which necessarily transcends all other identities, loyalties and chauvinism. They exist because we exist as something more than blind followers or sycophantic believers. The virtues of human rights are nor innate or a-priori or even necessarily logical or utilitarian not natural to our sense of understanding. There are no preexisting constraints demanding that we live by such a doctrine. If there were then it would be clear that their violation would have been the extreme exception than the pervasive common rule. This observation is nor borne out by any history. Realization of human rights often demands degrees of self abnegation, sacrifice and sense of social responsibility which appears foolish in many circumstances and frequently proves inimical to other divisive commitments which may seem immediately more urgent, more powerful or more necessary. And yet human rights as a doctrine of commitment remains the only meta-ethically justifiable value orientation after all the other moral contradictions of our common existence has been distilled away.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This work has begun with the issue of human rights to emphasize their central importance, both to the understanding of pan-humanness as an alternative philosophical paradigm and to the understanding of the dilemmas and theoretical problematics which confront humankind today, the resolution of which will determine our collective future.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If the problem of human rights and pan-humanness were left to the end, as originally intended, then its imperative sense of priority and importance would have been buried beneath the mountain that is to follow.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">PAN-HUMAN-NESS</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Pan-human-ness is an awakening of awareness of being fully human in an earthbound world. It is a state of collective conscience of the universal relationship between individual human identity and the identity of the whole of humankind. It is the state of full realization of humanity on our world, of human potential, of human rights and human equality. It frames our reason for being in our world and constitutes the ground of meaning of our world. It is humankind finally coming of age upon the earth, with the mature sensibilities and sensitivities of a universal world view.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">PRIDE AND HUMILITY</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must recognize all forms and examples of self pride as manifestations of over inflated and insecure 'ego' which we can ill afford to hang on to in our new earthbound environment. Jettisoning false pride as a dangerous value, we must embrace the value of humility in our social relations as a more adaptive way in the new age. Hubris and nemesis. The humility of the lowly turtle begets a long life. Our humility stems from the fact that in the face of natural forces we are indeed powerless to control change and to preserve perpetually the status quo of power. Embracing the humility of fundamental powerlessness will allow us to come to terms with our own natures and to resolve the Oedipal conflicts which plague our lives with anger and frustration.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">HUMAN RIGHTS, REVISED</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Everywhere human rights are proclaimed, but nowhere are they fully realized. The Bill of Rights was the singly best thing any group of politicians has ever done for humankind but now the recognition of our rights, and our collective need for their realization, demands radical revisioning in the face of unexpected global changes.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The full realization of human rights perhaps itself only an unrealistic utopian dream, is not necessarily an unworkable or impracticable impossibility. There is nothing intrinsic to the nature of state organization or of social structuration except perhaps the threat of violence which makes the chronic and massive violation of these rights an inevitability.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Like, pacifism, the doctrine of human rights is an ideological orientation which is based upon the commitment to certain kinds of values which depend upon a cultural and conceptual context for their appropriate comprehension and realization. In fact, human rights is concomitant with the value orientation of non-violence--these sets of values go hand in hand in the emancipation of humankind. A working definition of what constitutes violence (to use force) is the violation (from the Latin violare--to use force or violence) of human rights. Pacifism, as an ideology of non-violence, entails a commitment toward the realization of human rights in our common world and the cultivation of the kind of cultural and conceptual context which makes this realization an efficacious possibility.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The doctrine of human rights requires substantial revision because the cultural and conceptual contexts of their realization and violation have been dramatically altered. These radical changes have led to new kinds of rights and new kinds of situations which contest them, to new ways of realization and new means of violation. To a great extent the rethinking of the original formulations has not been able to keep up with such substantive and contextual alterations of the social environments of their instantiation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A revised list of new Human Rights would include the following:</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">1. The Right to a Home. No more homeless, no more refugees, no more slum lords, no more ghettos, no more tenements. Homes with yards, children, animals, peace, security and freedom.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">2. The Right to Work. Real jobs that pay enough to live on and then some to save with. Jobs that do not consume an entire life time. Jobs with benefits and security. No more unemployment, no more underemployment, no more systematic discrimination or obfuscation. No more labor exploitation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">3. The Right to Health. Health is a human right, not a privilege of the few and wealthy. Dying of cancer should not entail a life time of debt. No more unaffordable health insurance.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">4. The Right to Eat. Adequate nutrition is a human right. No more starving poor or malnourished children. No more hunger.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">5. The Right to Education. Education is in a privilege of the wealthy but a right of all people. Education to as high a level of attainment as a person decided, in an open and public forum.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">6. The Right to Life Choices. We have a right to be what we want to be, no one can decide what we can or cannot become.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">BASIC HUMAN RESPONSIBILITIES</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Basic human rights are constrained only by a corresponding set of basic human responsibilities, such that the normative freedom and realization of our own rights does not entail the violation of the rights of others.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">These responsibilities are universal--we apply them in regard to all human beings and we expect them of all human beings. No nationalism or ethnocentrism or familism can deny or preclude such pan human responsibilities.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A brief incomplete list would include the following responsibilities:</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">1. The Responsibility to Non-violence. Non-violence in any way, at any level or distance of involvement. Violence is the principle means of the violation of human rights.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">2. The Responsibility to Non-exploitation. We cannot use, dominate, manipulate other people for our own gain, greed or aggrandizement, however indirect our involvement.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">3. The Responsibility to Respect. We must respect the basic rights of all others and show people the basic dignity which comes with a common humanity and collective human identity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">4. The Responsibility of Honesty. We cannot lie, cheat, deceive other to our own advantage or their disadvantage. We cannot disseminate information which distorts, deludes, deceives or persuades others in underhanded ways.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">5. The Responsibility to Independence. We must think, speak and act independently of others. We must not become sycophants, true believers, proselytizers. We must regularly and courageously exercise our normative freedom even if it entails persecution and punishment.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">6. The Responsibility to Intervene. We must intervene in the violation of the rights of others, if and when their rights are clearly violated and when we are able to do something constructive in this intervention.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">7. The Responsibility of Knowledge. Knowledge creates responsibility. To know and do nothing is irresponsible. It ignore and fail to know is irresponsible. We have a responsibility to be informed and to inform.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">8. The Responsibility to Health. Health is not just a human right, but a human responsibility. We have a responsibility to amend unhealthy habits and reneging such a responsibility violates our own as well as the rights of others.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">9. The Responsibility to Equality. We have a responsibility to treat all others equally, to not dominate others or submit to the subordination by others or by systems of authority.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">10. The Responsibility to Non-discrimination. We must not be prejudiced or projective towards others, or treat people unequally or unfairly on the basis of human differences.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">11. The Responsibility to Open-mindedness. We have a responsibility to not become closed minded, to allow our ideologies to obscure our vision of the world, to not adopt in-group/out group prejudices.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">12. The Responsibility to Pan-humanness. We have a basic identity to be our own basic humanity and to all of humankind, we have an obligation and a loyalty to uphold and support this pan human identity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">These are some of the possible human responsibilities of our world. The list is imperfect and needs to be amended but it points in the basic direction.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">THE RULE OF VIOLENCE</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Theories of state organization, of imperialism and the history of human civilization, attest to the predominance of the rules of violence. Even pre-historic patterns unearthed everywhere, and the stories of early hominid evolution, show how the rule of violence has been deeply buried and well rooted in our collective past. This has led some skeptics and pessimists to assert scientifically that violence is an innate human universal which must somehow be socially counteracted or deterred by punishment. Indeed. There is a great deal of evidence to support such a 'realistic' view.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The rule of violence is based upon the coercive power of the threat of destructive force--to harm, injure, terrorize, torture, murder. It's power is also subversive in a totalizing sense, as its threats fosters and reinforces fear which pervades and permeates every dimension of existence and tends to cumulatively undermine all resistance. Fear as a primary organizing principle in life leads inexorably to totalitarianism. Its power is very strong and effective, almost complete, in its ability to predetermine the organization of our lives. If human beings are not innately violent, at least the fear of violence and the efficacy of its threat seems inherent.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The rule of violence has its own kind of cultural and conceptual context. It is embedded within a moral ideology based upon a postulate that 'might makes right'. Ethical philosophers have ardently contested such claims, but there is a great deal of historical evidence prejudicing people in favor of such 'amoral realism'. The problem in arguing against such a doctrine is that, while there are many instances in history indicating that indeed, 'might makes right', there are a few if any clear illustrations of the counterexample of that 'right makes might'. Usually government demonstrate their might force before they go on to proclaim the sacredness of their ideologies and actions. If Hitler had won the World War, our sense of right and wrong would have been very different than what it did become. If communism had gained world control like capitalists so feared, our sense of social responsibility would be quite different than it now seems to be.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But does this mean that because a new world order has prevailed, the moral ideologies and principles upon which it has been founded are necessarily the 'right' ones? There is a strong suggestion that our own common sense of what constitutes right from wrong is not without some important contradictions. The present capitalist world system is one world order which lacks clear and unambiguous ontological status of a meta-ethical universal value system. Its values of consumption, development, progress, utilitarianism, materialism, private censorship, exploitation and that wealth makes virtue must be highly suspect as meta-ethically justified when superimposed upon a diverse world. Capitalism itself is a fundamentally 'chiliastic' ideology with its own sense of destiny in the making.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Though the principle of 'might makes right' may have historical justification in a real sense, philosophers would still argue that might is not necessarily right in any ideal sense. This is the critical difference between disappointment of the way it is--of the realities of the collective state of humanity and the common condition of humankind as they have been and come to be, and the expected ideal state of enlightenment and emancipation as it should and hopefully will become.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The rule of violence and injunction that 'might makes right' is not completely useless to rational philosophers in their metaphysical worlds--indeed they cannot do without its naked realities and sense of realism in anchoring their feet to the ground, for it provides the baseline and dialectical counterpoint upon which to base their destruction of its sense of realism--a common senseness which has great appeal to masses--and from which to reconstruct a meta-ethical philosophy, and a teleological state of reality, in which 'right does make might'. And this is to be found in the violation and valorization of human rights.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">NONVIOLENCE AS A VALUE ORIENTATION</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The values of non-violence require a cultural and conceptual context by which to be understood. These values and their orientations in which they are bound are foreign to western ideologies, even though the dominant Christian ethos espoused is one of brotherly love.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The two kinds of value orientations share some important similar attributes of non-vengeance, respect and appreciation for the sanctity of life. But there are also important differences of context which need to be explicitly contrasted. It is possible that these differences constitute one of the most fundamental cultural orientations separating East and West as distinctive historical civilizations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From an occidental standpoint, the values of non-violence tend to be understood as a fairly radical orientation, the essence of which is a live and let live ethos, universal toleration and respect for life in all its different manifestations. Non-violence is construed as a passive orientation, encouraging non-resistance to force, acceptance of difference, forbearance and toleration, but also leading towards a kind of pervasive apathy, neglect, complacency and ignoring of suffering in the world. It is a commitment to not hate, but not to love.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Love is not a commitment to not hate, as hate is often only a pathological substitute for the failure of love--that which we are denied love often becomes the perverted object of hate. Universal love, on the other hand, embodies an active principle to not ignore--an altruistic command to alleviate suffering in the world and to demonstrate one's devotion by sympathy. But it sometimes proves difficult in such an orientation to simply accept extreme differences, and can lead to acts of intolerance and a proselytizing orientation of minding other people's business.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Being habitually non-violent towards one's neighbors does not necessarily entail loving them as brothers or equals, but being committed to loving one's neighbors sometimes demands that we treat them in ways they might not really want to be treated, 'for their own good' and also implicitly demands that they must love us in return.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Non-violence does not require compassion, and having compassion does not always lead to non-violence, but both pathways do lead to conceptions of emancipation and enlightenment as somehow necessary and important aspirations of human spiritual life. The oriental path to enlightenment is by detachment from suffering and devotion to the emancipation of the inner life--spiritual nirvana or satori. The occidental path necessarily carries us down the road through rational idealism, enlightenment from the darkness of ignorance, to the emancipation of external existence from the bondage of vice, sin and uncertainty. Both paths lead to eternity in the here and after--one by escaping the karma of reincarnation, the other by going to heaven, to the city on the hill.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">For two millennium we have actively promoted dominant shared ideologies based upon the value orientations of brotherly love, and it has consistently failed to prevent violence in the world. And yet we cannot fail to simply ignore suffering in the world. It is only when the values of love and non-violence in all their existential ramifications become consistently and coherently conjoined in our common world, that we can hope for a better collective environment in our future.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">ENLIGHTENMENT AND EMANCIPATION</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Enlightenment, the state of being illuminated or act of giving clearer views, to enable to see 'truth' began as late as the 18<sup>th</sup> century movement in Europe which emphasized rationalism, education, skepticism, and empiricism in social and political thought. An implicit part of this doctrine was to free the mind from ignorance, prejudice and superstition and to this extent can be linked to a kind of spiritual emancipation from the bondage and restraints of an unfree and biased mind. Still enlightenment was, and still is, held to be the way to the eventual emancipation of the human being, and of humanity, from the bondages of our own prejudices and errors. Through our enlightenment we are supposed to become aware of kinds of servitude we have been subjected to and to realize in ever greater degrees our need for freedom from control. Implicitly this spirit of emancipation extends to corporeal and existential freedom, construed as prerequisite to spiritual salvation and liberation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Truth and freedom are deeply linked in the tradition of our beliefs--attainment of truth leads to our freedom, as a state of being metaphysically, existentially and normatively free, and perhaps, becoming free leads to our attainment of a condition of final truth, as well.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The ideology and philosophy of our secular science embodies and reflects this tradition. The scientific attitude is typically skeptical and rational, a frame of mind tempered by a strong and severe sense of empirical vision. The freedom it seeks is freedom from ignorance and superstition.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Eastern enlightenment remained one of religious and philosophical attainment, it remained spiritual and aimed at the emancipation of the soul from the bondage imposed by the body. Western enlightenment was from it beginning rationalistic, aiming at the emancipation of the body from the bondage of blindness and false beliefs. Eastern enlightenment and emancipation remained 'other worldly' while Western enlightenment and emancipation became 'this worldly' in orientation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Emancipation has been linked to normative freedom and liberation from the threat and force of violence--as violence is to be seen as primary means by which involuntary servitude and bondage are enforced. In this way the rule of violence and threat of force is to be considered as antithetical to the doctrine and spirit of enlightenment. Threat of force is irrationality based on fear, punishment is counter educational and prejudice and ignorance come from and lead to its rule.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If emancipation comes from enlightenment it also precedes enlightenment. Freedom, both normative and existential is the road to enlightenment.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">(STARTING FROM PAGE 102)</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">East and West, the traditional ideals of emancipation and enlightenment are the distinguishing themes of human civilization, providing the context by which to measure qualitatively our attainment of human civilization. The technological development and advancement of our science are held to valorize these ideals as truth. They provision the theme of rational truth with an empirical sense of realism difficult to deny and harder to criticize.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">PACIFIST PROBLEMS</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Pacifism is the ideological orientation based upon a commitment to a non-violent value orientation. Entailing being more than merely a conscientious objector or a demonstrator for peace a militant police force, pacifism entails a whole way of life and a way of thinking which influences many areas of day to day living and which has symbolic resonances throughout our cultural universe. Pacifism as an ideological commitment, as a way of living and thinking, provides the necessary cultural and conceptual context required for the appropriate understanding of non-violence as a necessary value orientation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In one way or another, most existential dilemmas of human social life relate in one way or another to the issue of relative non-violence, and pacifism as a theoretical and practical orientation, promoting and understanding non-violence becomes a fruitful approach to the interpretation and possible resolution of such problems. By defining a universal human problem set in the framework of pacifism, we are thereby outlining as well a pacifist paradigm for the normative comprehension of human reality which incorporates the necessary context for the elucidation of non-violence--teaching us a genuine and sublime appreciation for its values as a human way of life.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Learning what non-violence is and how it affects our daily life and our everyday social world is an important prerequisite to the creation of a common well being in our collective future. It is a primary value orientation which cannot be suspended without doing further harm in the world. And most of the violence in the world is due to the fact that either directly or indirectly we have consistently failed to cultivate either culturally or conceptually a non-violent value orientation and have failed ideologically to realize a genuine commitment to pacifism.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We even lack the appropriate terms with which to talk about it in any interesting or relevant way.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">PASSIVE RESISTANCE</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A pacifist orientation does not entail only a rejection or a refusal to participate in any way in the promotion of violence in the world--it also entails an 'activist' form of 'passive resistance' to all those aspects and things in our earthbound environment which have some direct or indirect relationship to the promotion of violence in the world. It begins n our own daily personal lives and extends outwardly beyond any narrow sense of identity or loyalty to encompass and embrace the collective well being of the whole earth and all of humankind. It entails redressing the evil of 'Great and Impersonal Organization' and its depowerment in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The poor are the only experts about poverty. It is in their hidden and untapped potential that the poor dwells to cultivate a ground swell which will eventually bring peaceful change in the world. It is through their grass roots and ad hoc organizations and networks, created in the face of dire need and extreme circumstance and in the absence of any screens of social support that the designs for an alternative kind of future exists for the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">WORLD PEACE</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The possibility of world peace must be recognized and promoted through understanding towards its realization. The ecological movement is founded upon the notion of Green Peace, one which deliberately demotes the idea of a single world order as inherently unstable and prone to evil, and instead promotes a greening of the world by a political economic fissioning into small, provincial sizes states any of which would lack the power to dominate globally through the threat of force.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The notion of the necessity of global peace, and of the likely destructiveness of future wars, and of the likelihood of the escalation of future conflicts past the nuclear threshold, threatens devastation not only of human civilization but of the very biosphere upon which our civilization depends.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Besides contributing to the understanding of the problematics of the world system, a major contribution of anthropology has been to the understanding of the central problem of ethnocentrism as a basic human bias in inter-group relations and cross cultural contact, and its promotion of the notion of cultural relativism as an antidote for ethnocentrism based upon an appreciation and tolerance of many cultures.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the study of culture shock and cross cultural contact, it is apparent that there is only one healthy way of promoting cross cultural relations and exchange, one which is free of ethnocentric bias. This is referred to as 'cultural integration' and requires mediation between cultures. It leads to a form of 'multiculturalism' in which an individual may function adaptively in more than one culture setting, with equal facility in each. Such individuals serve the function of culture brokers or mediators for cross cultural contact situations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There has been the development of a third culture of the world. Composed of 'multi-cultural' people who no longer identify exclusively of primarily with a single cultural configuration or value orientation. These people develop an independent values system which transcends cultural boundaries, incorporating multi-cultural paradigms, and allowing them easy access between different cultural realities.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">An extension of this notion of multiculturalism is the notion of the 'cultural continuum' as a symbolic syncretism in which individuals may choose to configure the symbolic elements of their life into highly individualized paradigms derived from a plethora of different cultural orientations, selective choosing what serves them best from a wide range of available options.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Another aspect of this is education not for intellectual development alone but for social normative growth as well, for maturation of the 'ethical quotient' to a transcendent, 'post conventional' stage of moral conscientiousness and normative independence which embraces cultural relativism as a value orientation of universal tolerance, equality and multiculturalism and eschews the conventional morality of ethnocentrism.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Unfortunately, most individuals do not mature much beyond a 'conventional stage' of moral conscientiousness, reached at high school. The conventional morality is one which does not transcend cultural ethnocentrism, but remains bound symbolically to the narrowly defined loyalties and 'amoralisms' of the culture in which it is configured. Colleges take kids to the first level of post conventional development characterized by rebellion against conventional morality, such a stage of rebellion is tied to the very morality it is bent on destroying and represents a counterculture rather than a genuinely transcendent third culture. Most college students graduate with a keenly developed sense of self importance and power in the world that comes from striking a compromise and making a contract with its conventional morality to uphold it whatever the criticisms. Very few individuals have ever achieved a genuinely transcendent post conventional stage of moral maturity--Albert Schweitzer's and M.K.Ghandi's and Martin Luther King's are few and far between in an increasingly authoritarian world. Such individuals define their moral duty independently of any cultural value orientation and allow their existences to be guided by such transcendent values in spite of the social costs it usually entails.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is not too much to expect that schools could in their advanced curriculum carry the individual beyond the rebellious stage and into a transcendent, independent level of normative development and socialize individuals for a sense of moral responsibility which transcends narrow ethnocentrisms and has a pan human frame of reference and an individual human focus. Such instruction is not very problematic nor difficult to implement and its effective implementation would have long lasting consequences in both the individual's lifetime and in the lifetime of the world.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER">PART III</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">PARADIGMS AND POWER</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></font></b></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Paradigm is defined as a pattern, and example or a model. Formally it is considered a basic set of principles or rules governing particular relations, and in scientific philosophy it has become conventional to refer to social paradigms as bodies of theories around which particular kinds of practices accrete. As a pattern or model a paradigm is considered relatively fixed and stable, and as an example it is one that is exceptionally illustrative of what is represents.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">As something overarching, fixed and exemplifying, it is the interrelationship between paradigms and power to control change in the world that provides the framework for understanding the consistency of patterning of certain social processes and structures in the world, their cycles of development and the consequences upon the lives of people who live within their 'spheres of influence'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is in terms of paradigms and their social organizing power that we can especially understand the general phenomena of evil in the world, its paradigmatic etiology and effects, and the recurrent, characteristic patterns of 'structure' by which social empowerment becomes expressed. Paradigms are not themselves necessarily good or evil, but it is through its everyday expression that both evil and goodness eventuate, and though people may be enacting their roles in the good faith of genuine belief in their own goodness or righteousness, the consequences of their actions frequently result in evil for others or for themselves.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">People require paradigms in their lives to provide order, direction and sense of purpose to their behavior. People cannot live very well without them. Paradigms are primarily symbolic and conceptual in nature, those ideas and metaphors underlying our structures of belief and collective conscious. They are organizational metaphors and key or dominate summarizing/elaborating symbolisms which, though they have no concreteness in themselves, take on the sense of giveness as if they were concrete and physically real, via the juxtapositioning and replacement of all the things which they stand for in the world. As such they help to clarify, simplify, solidify and disambiguate our worlds, resolving psychologically existential uncertainty and contradictions encountered in existence.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Furthermore, paradigms typify reality for us, and typically sanction our adoption of regular practices, rituals, routines, habits, buzz words and clichés which tend to reinforce the apparent solidity, simplification ad disambiguating function of paradigms, further reifying their value through the demonstration of their efficacy. At this level they take on a concrete giveness in our lives, a common senseness, in which it becomes difficult to tell which came first, the paradigm or the enactment of its example. They gain the force of custom and the unconscious power of an indirect constraint--we can no longer function socially without them. They then acquire a certain transparency in our lives--an invisibility of their symbolic and metaphorical arbitrariness, a non-reflexive attitude toward their routine enactment. To begin to question them becomes not just taboo, but an exceptional absurdity and blasphemy--it is to question what is apparently the very foundation for our sense of order and basis of meaning in our lives.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">At this point paradigms have achieved social power in our lives, and to contest them is to go against this power. The power of paradigms then acquires an unconscious influence in our lives, and we begin acting in ways which systematically exclude ideas, symbols or actions which might possibly contradict or threaten to undermine the paradigms we live by. We erect barriers and thresholds to our understanding and even or perception of reality. Discrepancies and exceptional oddities in our environments which seem to run counter to our paradigmatic order or challenge it become systematically ignores, denied or prejudiced against as anti-thetical counter examples. We edit out or experiences of our environments, selecting what seems fit and casting our what doesn't. The greater the power of paradigms, the more we come to depend upon its organizing and simplifying influence, the more to work to enact its sense of giveness and efficacy in our lives, and the more we act against anything which will not fit easily into its simplifying sense of order. The power of paradigms are their control over our lives, both consciously and unconsciously and their promotion and perpetuation even against rationally convincing counter examples and contrary evidence, leads to the irrationality of our own rationalizations and the rationalization of our own irrationality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Paradigms are typically human and social way we have for controlling and dealing psychologically and behaviorally with change in our lives. And the control of change is what human power is all about. It is the influence of paradigms over change in our lives from which its power is derived and it is the influence of change over the paradigms in our live from which its power is deprived. It is the sense of power, our identification with its influence that forms the illusion and the ground of meaning in our lives.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is a grand paradox of life that change is the only law we must really obey. Change is inevitable, inexorable and always entropic as its source is rooted in the experience of entropy in the universe. We measure change by marking time and we measure time by marking change. This is the basis of our science and the reason for its being in the prediction and control of change in our world. The perfect clock is the only unchanging device we have, because it has perfectly, accurately regularized the rhythms of change to absolutely reduce its sense of irregularity. And yet the phenomenon and experience of changes happens in our lives regardless of our clocks and our perfect cycles and circles and in the long run it always tends to carry us towards the absolute chaos of entropy. And except by the imputation of imperfect causality we have no other way of understanding the principle of change except as entropy, or complete randomization.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is the ordeal of change, the existential uncertainty, the elemental unknown that it brings to our lives and the incurable sense of insecurity and fear that the fixedness of the patterns of paradigms helps us to cope and deal with in ways which regularize, temporize and reduce the randomness of change. Paradigms counteracts change, carrying us from the edge of chaos toward the 'center' of perfect order. The functions of paradigms are anti-chaotic and the stability of its fixed patterns provide the sense of changelessness, and eternity of being, which we associate with sacredness and sanctity. We worship its power in its daily routines and rituals, through the expression of its symbolisms and sensibility of its verities.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Paradigms are never perfectly fixed in their patterning--their preservation frequently requires periodic modifications of its elements and relations, alterations which tend to result in the redesigning of its patterning--its dynamic reorganization. Paradigms exist in a critical condition of self organization. The additive effects of change produces supercritical events which tend to reestablish stability and order to the system--preserving the constancy of the whole pattern by sacrificing parts or portions of the whole. Part of the power of paradigms is their potentiality for maintaining stability and constancy of overall pattern at the hypercritical edge of chaos while allowing the alteration of its elements and their interrelations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is no single paradigm in our lives, and no single paradigm is ever complete or total or absolutely dominant, except that we do not try to make them so. Paradigms are always unfinished, imperfect and finite in their circumscription of phenomena or influence of events. For all the fixedness and constancy of their patterning, paradigms are subject to the same principles of change and randomization as is anything else in the universe. In our worlds, there are always multiple paradigms, overlapping one another, paradigms within other paradigms, often competing or conflicting with one another, frequently functioning partially and mutually together. Our attempt to single out a key, dominant paradigm, to hierarchize them, to make them complete or all encompassing, to permanently fix their patterning is always bound for frustration, creating more anxiety that the capacity of paradigms can resolve. But we cannot live without them, they have a purpose and a function in our lives, and hence a necessity and an imperative.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is the overall robusticity and long term structural stability of paradigms which gives them a kind of historical momentum and directionality of development which tends to follow repetitive, sequential patterns of unfolding and which in the viewpoint of the long run makes its change seem periodic, saltational and cynical.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Evolution is a paradigm. We are also paradigms, metaphysically and naturally. Culture and history is paradigmatic. Our minds are paradigmatic, as are our societies, organizations, families and our daily lives. Our science is paradigmatic and so is our religion, our art, our philosophies and our technologies. Though everything is paradigmatic, nothing in our lives is completely so. Everything is only partially paradigmatic and also poly-paradigmatic.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Paradigms provide fundamental ways of seeing and relating to the world. They are inherently problematic and in their problematicalness are also inherently paradoxical. Paradigms provide problems about problems of other problems--they are paradigms about problems and problems about paradigms and in this is their paradoxicalness. The apparent fixedness and constancy of paradigms covers over many other important and related problems and the covering over of these problems itself creates a problem which in turn needs to be covered over. If its power constitutes our ground of meaning, beneath this apparent power is problematic powerlessness of the groundlessness of our being. Its paradox is that we depend both upon its ground of truth and its bottomlessness of reality for our sense of being in the world. The solution of its problematicalness is the resolution of its paradigmatic paradoxicalness--it is indeed just another Humpty Dumpty.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A psychological part of the paradoxicalness and problematicalness of paradigms is the tendency to construe things in its identity of relationships in the world in a way either emphasizing the non-relation of absolute differences or the relation of relative difference/similarity. The former way is what leads to paradox, as it entails a black and white or either/or kind of attitude toward the world which construes the paradigms as inflexibly fixed and the identity of things as either conforming or as anti-thetical. The paradox this leads to is a fundamentally divided reality, and a need to reunite the separate elements in order to reestablish unity of relationship. Part of this paradox is that this is widely held to be the dual logic rationality upon which our science rests, although science is frequently more synthesizing than analyzing. Such two value logic is also purported to be what distinguishes the modern, rational, civilized mentality from the primitive, irrational, savage mentality. It is the inability to see the gray, in between areas which accounts for the irrationality of a Hitler, and not the rationality of a pre-literate person. The latter way of identity of relations begins in paradox--of both/and and the grayness of the excluded middle ground, and leads to the resolution of this paradox through dialectical meta-logic. The former way leads from non-contradiction to contradiction, the latter way leads from contradiction to non-contradiction.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The natural, rational aspect of paradigmatic patterns is the latter integrative way--the way that successful assimilates change, while the rationalizing, exclusive way which protects the fixedness of paradigms from change is the former, dichotomizing way. The latter way complicates paradigms to the point of their reintegration, the former way simplifies paradigms to the point of their immobilization and disintegration.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is the latter way which leads to adaptation, accommodation and assimilation of change, it is the former way which leads to fixation, maladaptation and perseveration. The latter way is a way of health, the former way is the way of disease.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Part of the paradox is that in the adaptation of the short run, the former way often appears to be the more successful and 'adaptive', but the longer it is pursued the stronger it becomes and the more difficult it becomes to give up and change one's way. In short sighted strategies the latter way often appears chaotic, random, unfixed but the longer it is pursued the more its self organization becomes visible and understandable.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The former way that tends to dichotomize reality is the way that fears the unknown, devalues diversity, complexity and is obsessive over uncertainty. It leads to prejudicial projection and behavioral discrimination between people, creating in group/out group boundaries between people which denies common humanity and individual human identity. This is the way of evil.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Evil is not just a moral dilemma, but as a facet of human reality it is an anthropological problem in that it is necessary to understand it as empirical behavior and as symbolic phenomena in response to such questions as 'what constitutes evil' and 'why do people do evil' and 'how can evil in the world be prevented or cured'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There are different kinds of evil in the world, for many different reasons, so it makes little sense to speak of the problem of evil, either anthropologically, morally or philosophically as if evil were a single abstract with a single kind of etiology, ontology or teleology. Such a monothetic conception would make evil a concern of rational philosophy and not an anthropological problematic of empirical human reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Nonetheless, evil has a common set of general traits which can be associated with it in most instances. First, it is a consequence of the arbitrariness of power which renders one person's happiness subject to another person's will. Secondly, it involves some measure of violence, which is either destructive of life or the things upon which life depends or constitutes violations to basic human rights and freedoms. Third, it involves some kind of human aggression which is directed in a violent, destructive way, or at least in a destructive domineering manner. Fourth, it entails victimization or scapegoating which is the targeting of one's aggression upon a hapless or defenseless victim. The organization of evil involves the dependency of domination or the parasitic exploitation of one person or group over another person or group. Evil also involves the tyranny of fear and the rule of threat of violent force to reinforce relationships of dominance, dependency and exploitation. Finally evil entails deliberate intention or purposefulness, however indirect, relative, unconscious--it entails evilness of mind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There have been many forms of evil perpetrated by humankind--racial discrimination, prejudice, physical and verbal abuse, sexual victimization, war, involuntary servitude, coercion, black propaganda, cruelty to animals, exploitation, authoritarianism. Another common feature of the etiology of evil is that the perpetrator usually believes he/she can get away with the crime, that they are stronger than their victim and that they are either beyond the purview of moral constraint, punishment or retribution, or else they are acting within the purview of their own amoral system of rationalization which justifies evil. It is this sense that makes evil so monstrous and insidious.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There have been many more indirect and impersonal forms of evil. Organized evil is usually indirect and impersonal--mandated by the structural ethos of the organization or the consequence of its functioning. It comes with the diffusion of responsibility or the passing of the buck up or down the hierarchy of power. There is also evil of unintended consequences, in the perpetuation of preventable poverty or hunger, of the uninvolved bystander, in non-intervention as well as a great deal of evil perpetrated in the name of Good, God or Glory--the slaughter of the American Indian in the name of Manifest, Destiny, Enlightenment and Civilization, for instance.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We are in need of a descriptive and normative paradigm of the problem of evil, one which will transcend its relativity of power and values and one which comprehends its variation and leads to an understanding of its reasons, etiologies and remedy in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Evil is defined as 'anything that causes displeasure, injury, pain, suffering, etc., or moral depravity, wickedness, anything morally bad or wrong'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">One aspect of organized evil is that it is relatively impersonal. It derogates a human being into a 'thing' or an object to be manipulated and used and disposed of when its usefulness is worn out. It denies human individual's their own personal identity, their beingness and devalues their subjectivity and experience. It promotes by hook and by crook conformity to superhuman social ideals, and to the moral authority and super organic superiority of the social order, as it is represented and embodied in persons occupying positions of authority. It is this pervasive and diffuse impersonalness of evil systems which allows such social structures to continue its corporate perpetration and perpetuation of evil in the world while fostering an illusion of moral legitimacy or rational purpose.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">One aspect of this form of organized evil is its preservation and protection of an 'inner sanctum' of conformity to a 'vital lie' or a 'sacred secret' by its reinforcement of a circle of deceit in belief and behavior. Information networks, gossip networks, special jargon, reinforce in group conformity to hierarchy and status identity and out group boundaries of projection and discrimination. Part of the 'inner sanctum' is the secrecy and hierarchy of a 'back region' of the darkness of evil, in which evil deeds are devised and perpetrated with immunity, impunity and anonymity. The threat and fear of punishment and persecution usually surrounds and protects this inner sanctum from the public discovery of its evil nature or actual intentions of power.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The organization of evil is associated with the development of authoritarian power structures which become organized on the principle of fear and the threat of violence or punishment. Such power structures foster and attract into its ranks and reinforces such tendencies among its constituency, of psycho social authoritarianism. Such authoritarianism, part of a personality disorder of obsessive compulsiveness, sado-masochistic tendencies, displacement of libido onto symbols of authority, power and fear motivation, impulse control disorders, symbolic dependency and fixation, leads by accretion and organized accumulation to social institutions of authoritarian power structures which are a kind of social pathology.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Such authoritarian power structures have been common throughout human history, and have had many unfortunate consequences for humankind. Authoritarianism organizes itself into larger and larger systems through the promotion of conformism and mediocrity, as the predisposition to such personality is the attraction to power, the fascination with evil, destructiveness and perverse morbidness of death, and the need to immerse personal identity within a larger, impersonal social order. Authoritarian seek communities and comfort and security among other authoritarian, and have a need for the social hierarchy and symbols of authority which fits their character.. authoritarianism structures itself. Furthermore, evil, in its moral anti-structure requires a communities and social liminality, a shared sense of guilt, fear and social reinforcement of its evilness. It is much easier for people to perpetrate evil when their own individual identity is immersed in the anonymity of larger groups and impersonalness of organization.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Understanding a meta-ethical and empirical paradigm of evil in the world requires that we frame it in terms of a normative disease, a social pathology and a collective archosis which provides an effective expression of individual neurotic tendencies and psychotic pre-dispositions in ways which help the individual to adapt as if normal within the structure of the group which is itself abnormal in parallel ways. As a disease, the structure of evil is not just an organismic dysfunction, but rather is also a problem of environmental maladaptiveness and 'misfit' in ways that are fundamentally destructive.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Psychologically, the structure of evil begins with the tyranny of fear. Failure to confront the unknown, to face our fears, to avoid and ignore those differences, contradictions or in between symbols which cannot fit easily into our nomothetic world view, leads to its 'stimulus generalization' and to the general existential pervasiveness in our lives. We no longer control our fears, but fear controls us.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Socially, the structure of evil transmutes the psychological tyranny of fear into the rule of the threat of violence. Our fears become displaced upon symbols of authority which threaten punishment for non-conformity to its dictates. Fear motivation, fear of failure, of persecution and punishment, drives people upward in the organization of evil through identification with authority. The control of fear over our being leads to the structuration and organization of people into systems of hierarchy and conformity based upon a common, shared fear motivation. Our collective fears become projected onto convenient out group symbols, victims of scapegoats, which become the objects of threat, contamination, abhorrence, hate in our lives. They realize our fears for us in a personally harmless way, such that we may then punish them with impunity. They embody our fears, giving them a concreteness and an objectivity in our lives. Systems of evil play upon our fears and an objectivity in our lives. Systems of evil play upon our fears and try to augment them to induce greater degrees of conformity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">'World view' is a special kind of paradigm which is characterized by its comprehensiveness, its 'singleness' which purports to subsume other paradigms, its tendency to exclude other possible world views and its possession of a sense of center, or core of 'fixedness' around which its world view is oriented. It is this centeredness which structures its world view, and which possesses what post structuralist critics refer to as the 'principle of presence' of its structure.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The paradigm of the structure of evil is essential a kind of 'world view' paradigm which is characterized by its center of structure, its comprehensiveness and exclusiveness. It is as a 'world view' problem that the paradigm of evil is to be best understood.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The modern state of the world is characterized by a problem of 'world view' which is in fact an interrelated set of problems of different 'world views' subsumed by a single meta-theme of the 'world view problem'. 'World view' is both a problem by itself, in a general sense and a gloss for a range of particular problems in the real world--these two senses cannot be separated from one another in any but the most analytical way, but their synthesis has a synergism which if clearly elucidated has productive implications for our understanding of problems in the world on a microscopic level and world problems on a macroscopic order.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Traditionally, the world view problem has been philosophically and philologically a problem inherent to 'culture history' which as posed several dilemmas which have had unfortunate implications in the world. It has been used for the justification of ethnocentric 'superman ideologies' which promote a conservative status quo, reactionary regimes promoting a romantic, ideological mythology of the past, and which lead to a great deal of unnecessary violence.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Part of the problem with the 'world view problem' has been that it has remained rather poorly, only partially elucidated as a systematic philosophical system of inquiry. As such it has suffered a misplaced identity as a self serving kind of philosophical 'determinism' which allows it to be easily attacked and easily abused and misused as a non-scientific ideology.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The primary function of any world view is to rationalize and legitimate the status quo of the existing order of things in the world. The status of a world view is tied to the present social relations and to those of the past which account for the present. World view normalizes the order of the world and naturalize the present. It provides a sense of coherence and consistency to our reality and sense of being in the world. It describes existing relationships in terms of how they should be--it does not prescribe how relationships should be regardless of how they are. World view cannot itself step outside of world order of existing relationships, but its own legitimacy is dependent upon the legitimization of the existing social order. Furthermore, world view is used to justify morally and ideologically behavior and beliefs which support such a status quo in the world, or which promulgate revolutionary or reactionary change in such relationships. World view infuses a person's and by extension a group's relationship with the world with a sense of purpose and a sense of reason, and it comes to centrally focus experience and the interpretation of experience in relation to the world around such purpose and reason. World view is an orienting force which serves to allow individuals to organize their lives in a meaningful and seemingly consistent way. World view becomes superimposed upon reality as an organizing force and orienting paradigm which gives an individual a sense of belonging, completion, omniscience, non-contradiction and purpose in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is in such a way that world view is ideological and tautological in its self rationalization and relationship to the world. It engages in a dialectical relationship with the world, but does not transcend the dialectic as dialectic. It then stands separately from a sense of history, as outside of the purview of historical understanding or not subject to laws of historical transformation and change. It replaces history with ideology and becomes itself 'history in the making'--a self fulfilling prophecy in which there is a rational isomorphism between the eidetic ideas and ideals and real relationships in the world. Ideas represent reality and reality replicates ideals. It begs the question of the actual representativeness and non-arbitrariness of such isomorphic models--implicit presuppositions remain hidden and covered over from view, which if made explicit would reveal contradiction and difference between the beliefs and the reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">World view has the advantage of situating us in the immediacy of the world. We take part in its principle of presence as we situate ourselves near the center. It simultaneously 'collectivizes' us in relationship with one another and 'relativizes' s in contra-distinction to others. It makes us real, or allows us realization in the world--to participate in the unfolding of events rather than to remain mere spectators.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">World view engages the sense of being in a dialectic between sense and nonsense, order and chaos, structure and entropy, presence and absence, which involves a predominance of 'structure' or of collectivizing or identification over relativizing or sense of difference. It leads to basic dialectical and discursive antinomies which underlie all of our symbolizations of the world--dichotomies of self/other, internal/external, male/female, nature/culture, ideal/real. These dichotomies form the dialectical themata about which all our symbolic discourse in the world is constituted--it is the basis of the constitution of meaning in the world. World view brings a sense of power and totality--of totipotency which depends upon its 'centeredness' and 'presence'. This is a form of power diametrically opposed to the relational sense of power derived from the potential totality of the universe, or its infinity. This is a holothetic form of totipotency in which the power of the part embodies and reflects but imperfectly and partially the power of the whole,, but there is no totalitarian or completely comprehensive or absolutely final vision of the whole. The center is always missing or absent, and its power is always decentered. The center, the origin cannot be fixed, but can only be found in all things everywhere.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Science separates the categories of Mind, Language and Culture for analytical purposes--in the process entailing reintegration such that each becomes 'explained' in reference to the other categories. But 'mind/language/culture' is a Humpty Dumpty kind of reality--a single symbolic stream of phenomena of human reality. Understanding each element necessitates understanding the others. In reality, there can be no clear separation of these concepts--they describe a single conflated integration of reality. These constitute homological facets of a single cybernetically integrated 'system'. This system is symbolic and symbolic integration of 'mind/language/culture' occurs intensively at the centeredness of being.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Language is seen as the principle mediating mechanism of the dialectic between Mind and Culture--it defines the textuality of Logos which situates the dialectic within the culture-historical continuum, within definite spatio-temporal coordinates.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">'Mind/language/culture' has a holothetic integrity--each process is a symbolic mediation of the dialectic of the other two. Altogether the whole system forms a complex dialectic interrelating several processes.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">'Mind/language/culture' constitutes the symbolic 'world view' the integrity of which defines the intensiveness and relative centeredness of being. 'World view' becomes the symbolic centeredness of being. At the center, the interrelations between mind, language and culture become deterministic in the directive selectivity of change--but this center point of presence is an ever receding absolute origin--it is the 'black hole' of culture historical determinism. Concentric degrees of distance from this hypothetical center point designates orders of 'relativity' of 'world view' such that 'mind/language/culture' becomes less and less intensively determined and more and more extensively 'undetermined' by randomizing selective powers.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Relative centeredness or the relativity of the center, leads to a contrast between 'intensiveness' and 'extensiveness'. Greater centeredness entails a greater intensiveness--greater distance from the center entails greater extensiveness. Where there is greater intensiveness there is less extensiveness and where there is greater extensiveness there is less intensiveness, but though contrastive, intensiveness if fundamentally different from extensiveness. The greater the intensiveness the greater the degree of qualitative distinctiveness and qualitatively defined symbolic coherence. The greater the extensiveness the greater the degree of quantitative continuity and the qualitatively defined consistency--qualitative difference gives way to quantitative similarity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The kinds of cohesiveness of intensive and extensive orientations are also fundamentally different--intensive cohesion is structurally defined from within, in relation to centeredness, defined by the symbolic integrity of relations. Extensive cohesion is defined from without the center, by the external relation with other centers within the extensive symbolic universe.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Extensiveness tends toward randomization, entropy and chaos. Intensiveness tends toward determination, fixedness, structure and anti-chaos.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Intensiveness consists of greater variations upon a few themes which are qualitatively distinctive. Extensiveness consists of fewer variations upon a multitude of themes--a thematic, qualitative multiplicity. Intensive cohesiveness emphasized difference upon a common theme--extensive cohesiveness emphasizes similarities or commonness of different themes.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From the standpoint of the mind, intensiveness at the center results in greater internal coherence--extensiveness from the center results in greater external consistency. Perfect mind must always be situated at the center. Natural mind tends to be displaced from the center, and tends toward extensiveness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Extensively defined identity of being is different from intensively defined identity of being.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Between the extensive and intensive, there must always be some intermediate, 'supercritical' phase of transition in which extensiveness and intensiveness counterbalance and cancel one another out.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Intensification is an implosive kind of internal growth which reaches the critical phase line. Extensification is an explosive diffusion which tends to occur beyond the critical phase line. We may say that the extensiveness is centrifugal while the intensiveness is centripetal in power.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The critical phase of transition between extensive and intensive orientations is the point in which, centrifugally, relativistic 'world view' disintegrates symbolically into a disparate mass of constituent units--forces of internal cohesiveness gives way to forces of external cohesiveness--and at which, centripedally, symbolic entities begin to coalesce into some semblance of internal order and integrity. Defined another way, it is the point of critical distance between symbolic components at which differences between components are counterbalanced by similarities--when such differences and similarities are defined thematically or qualitatively.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Within this phase line, the perspective of the world view is one of 'inside looking out'--an intensive point of view. Beyond this critical phase line the perspective of the center is seen from the outside looking in--the extensive viewpoint.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is possible to have an intensive perspective inside of the critical phase line, as well as to retain an intensive point of view beyond this line. This retention is largely a matter of individual mind. The intensive viewpoint becomes predominant inside and the extensive viewpoint predominate outside.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">All world views are intensive, and are therefore perspectives of power. The intensive world view, from the inside looking out is what has been called the 'emic viewpoint'. An extensive world view would be called an 'etic' or 'outsider's' perspective.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The extensive viewpoint cannot constitute a 'world view' in the sense that it lacks a symbolic centeredness of being, but is always defined as opposed or in contra distinctive reference to any such symbolic center. It is always defined in negative outline in contrast to what it is not, but always lacks a central reference point around which it can develop a directionally of beingness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The intensive viewpoint is constituted by the principle of critical presence--of a sense of purpose or integrity of beingness. The extensive viewpoint is in contrast constituted by the principle of critical absence--the sense of possible non-beingness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Intensive and extensive, presence and absence, centeredness and centerless, insider and outsider, constitute a dialectic in itself--a dialectic which informs a hermeneutical comprehension of culture history as a transcendent study of mind or logos as constituted by the dialectics of human identity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Change, as the Logos of Nature is universal and irreversible except in a limited, cyclical sense. Change at the center--intensive change--is fundamentally different from extensive change. Extensive change tends towards randomness, intensive change is more directional.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Power is defined as the control of change. Power is greater at the center--there is greater control over intensive change.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Intensiveness of being is defined as relative powerfulness; extensiveness of being is relative powerlessness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Power of change is causal power--the power of determination. Determination requires centeredness and intensiveness of being.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Power may be conservative or revolutionary, creative or destructive, eufunctional or dysfunctional, but it is never neutral or static.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Power related to selectiveness or selection in change--extensive selection is random or tends towards randomness in its multi-directionality. Intensive selection is purposive or non-random, tending towards uni-directionality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is something inherently corrupting about power--unconstrained power leads to absolute, unredressed corruption. The corrupting nature of power is in its arbitrariness. The more power an individual has the more such an individual is able to abuse and misuse power for evil purposes, with impunity and without fear of retribution. And it is not just that power leads to corrupt social practices but it is psychologically corrupting as well, in a way which is pathological both to the individual personality and to the larger society.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Power fosters an illusion of one's self importance in the world, of false pride and petty egoism of self interested and selfish greed, and it leads to the delusion of the social efficacy of power as an effective instrument in the control over others.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It leads to a system of symbolization and belief which sees power as morally pure, well intentioned, incorruptible, glossing over its own discrepancies and contradictions. Power leads to its own moral rationalization and legitimization in a sense of fate or destiny, and leads to a forgetfulness or ignorance of the need to seek standards of moral value outside the purview of its own control.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The pursuit of power becomes the aggrandizement and social charter for the pursuit of personal self interest in social forums. The very motivation which leads t the promotion of power leads to the erosion of the social fabric upon which its moral efficacy depends--the pursuit of self interest is valued above the common good, leading to the loss of trust and mutual respect upon which basic human reciprocities are based and balanced. The pursuit of power as disguised promotion of self interest and personal aggrandizement undermines the collective well being and fosters an atmosphere of competition, factionalization, conflict, chastisement with whips and scorpions, paranoid mistrust, and dirty closed door politics and retribution.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But there is something deeper and more sublime about the corruption of power. There is an attractiveness about power that makes most people seek it out, however covertly. Power legitimizes the personality and allows the rationalization of personal interest. Part of the illusion of power is the deference given to those who yield it, the deification of people who might otherwise appear quite ordinary or mundane. There is an illusion and hypocrisy about power in its vestiges, in the 'king's new clothes' which preconditions our perceptuality and conceptuality of experience, orienting our view of the world. The pursuit of power will lead to the overriding of many other kinds of constraints allowing people to do what they would not ordinarily attempt.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The psychology of power leads to the possibility of psychological evil. Power does not inevitably beget the corruption of evil, but it strongly predisposes people to it. The relativity of power allows it to be sometimes used for good as well as evil. But unconstrained, absolute power does lead to absolute evil.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The paradox of power is that, although it inevitably corrupts, it is the best means by which to protect and promote the good. This paradox is that the individual's with the most power to influence and create change for the better in the world are those least likely to do so because they are usually among the very individuals with the most to lose from such changes. Its paradox is that though it is the only pathway to the promotion of the self and realization of personality, it leads through a dark forest which endangers the personality and society with corruption.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Power has both real and imaginary, symbolic components in its manifestation in the world--it is always as much illusion and delusion as it is the actual reality of the 'way it is'. Power creates both Truth and Falsehood, both Right and Wrong. Both Good and Evil, through its realization in the world. The paradox of power is that it determines the world from possibility, but once having so determined it, it has limited and relativized it in its actualization.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The paradox of power is that we cannot live in a world without it, and yet we cannot live well with it. We are forced to seek compromises in our dealings with it, and we cannot safely renege our responsibility to do so.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Power creates entanglements as it enmeshes the individual involved in power in a social web of interdependencies which captures and immobilize the individual's spirit of independence and sense of normative freedom and it renders the person increasingly subservient to the interests of power within the system, the higher up the hierarchy the person may climb, and increasingly incapable of unwilling or resisting power in favor of alternative kinds of adaptations. Our ability to compromise with power becomes itself compromised.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Power is a vortex, a maelstrom, which as we become more caught up within its spiraling currents, as we are drawn increasingly towards its dark center, we are more and more incapable of escaping. It overwhelms us and submerge us and eventually drowns us in its flowing force.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The psychology of power is related to authoritarianism and the expression and symbolization of aggression and sexuality through processes of psycho-social internalization and identification, but its locus is in the interrelations between the self ego and its social environment of adaptation. Power is defined as the ability to create and control change in the world. The feeling of powerfulness comes from a sense of mastery, control over or adaptive success within any given environmental configuration. It is therefore quite reasonable to see that lack of fit with the environment creates stress experienced as anxiety and begets a sense of powerlessness in the world--loss of a feeling of control or ability to change the environment. Powerlessness results in frustration of the drive for power, in its subversion or perversion in indirect ways. Power corrupts because its motivation is never sated or completed. Natural change always tends to upset the ecological balance of power, and power always seek to restore its centeredness and to fulfill itself in ever greater proportions. The psychology of power is one of incompleteness and making up for 'lost time'. It is contagious and addictive--it spreads between people and people who become infected with it and caught up more and more in its entanglements.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Power has perceptual, conceptual, emotional and motivational components. It is derived from an existential, phenomenological need to maintain a rational 'unity of experience' such that perception, conception, emotion, motivation, behavior all can be seen as well as ordered, sensible, fitting together and following smoothly from one another. Percepts, concepts and drives reinforce one another and moderate one another in a way which makes 'sense' of experience. Lack of fit between inner and outer perception, between signifier and the signified, lead to 'cognitive dissonance' and attempts by individuals to modify or adjust their experiences to fit preconceived paradigms which reinforce their sense of order. This sense of order is founded in relationships of dominance and hierarchy--in being able to exert mastery over and control of objects in the environment which would otherwise be potentially threatening.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">'Psycho geography' is the study of the interconnections between object relations in the real, external world and internal psychological features of the ego. The environment becomes the symbolic representation and reflection of the sense of self, and the self becomes embodied in the environment. The body itself becomes represented as if the cosmic order of state and universe, and the external order becomes 'organicized' as if the body. This reveals how consciousness orders its experience of the world in the world. There is a dynamic repressive/projective, expressive/introjective relationship between inside and outside which constitutes part of the dialectics of the psychology of power.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">"The attribution to and representation of space in the topography of the human mind. Unintegrated aspects of the self and object representations and drive derivatives, unresolved psycho-sexual conflicts and body image are externalized onto people, places and things which come to be the outer referents for psycho geographic perception and action. (Stein pg. 78)</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Psycho geography is simply a way of understanding how people construct the physical and social world based on fantasies about their bodies and their families. (Stein pg. 79)"</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is from this basis that we can better understand the interconnection between personality and enculturation and culture--culture emanates from the psychology of the individual as a range of symbolic alternatives in a social environment. It is constituted through empowerment and enactment of power in ways which are psychologically relevant. 'Culture' denoted not so much an independent variable or context to which people adapt as it constitutes a symbolic or representational system that is heir to the inner 'representational world'. On the other hand, cultural symbolisms provide an external object environment and cultural historical relational context against which meaning and sense of self identity in the world can be configured and transformed.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Adaptation to environment is an ongoing and historically irreversible process, as the environment is always changing and so the organism's or organization's functional adaptive relationships with the environment are always tending to deteriorate entropically. The environment always threatens to undermine power with uncertain unpredictable changes.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The net result of such natural or randomizing change is disequilibrium or a lack of fit between the organism and the environment. This is experienced cognitively and psychologically in terms of cognitive dissonance and relative deprivation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anxiety is the result of anticipation of unpredictable change in adaptation. Stress is the measure or index of the relative lack of 'fit' within the environment. The experiences of stress, anxiety and the relationship by either changing the environment to suit the adaptive pattern of the organism, a typically cultural response when seen from the standpoint of the collectivity, a process known as 'assimilation' or else to modify the adaptive pattern of the organism by altering the organism's behavioral responses or structural characteristics or what is referred to as 'accommodation' to new features in the environment. Assimilation is an 'intensive' strategy of realignment between organism and environment, accommodation is an 'extensive' strategy.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Cognitive dissonance frequently leads to symbolic reinterpretation or rationalization of change and the lack of fit for the purposes of assimilating change to the previous cognitive orientation of the organism. Such rationalization prevents adaptive adjustments to change.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The experience of relative deprivation also leads to symbolic reevaluation, but it works from an extensive standpoint of attempting to accommodate internal states to externally derived differences. It leads to a revolution of equality and of rising expectations and it frequently is also ineffective in fostering adaptation because in its extreme condition it damages the integrity of its intensive orientation, and disintegrates due to the overpowering influence of the randomizing forces of external changes.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The experience of anxiety is the result of stress. Cognitive dissonance is the typical psychological mechanism which allows human adaptation to anxiety. A great deal of ritual, magic and myth is rooted in this mechanism for dealing with anxiety which is the 'symptom' of stress.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The long term experience of stress can lead to the adaptive malfunctioning of the individual, a breakdown in the coping mechanism and adaptive functioning of the individual, and its symptoms can become somatized in various ways or else lead to cybernetic feedback mechanisms which lead to less adaptive behavior patterns and modification, learned helplessness, stress response disorder which has a net negative effect upon the physical and psychological well being of the individual.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Anxiety and deprivation are experienced as relative states of being--cognitive dissonance is dependent upon anticipation, expectations, frames of reference/inference, flexibility and open-mindedness, the nature of environmental changes. The defense mechanisms of rationalization and intellectualization and behavioral ritualization creates an 'absolute' state of being and mind which anchors the individual to a given centeredness of orientation and serves to allay the experience of stress. It is a 'trick' or 'turn' of mind which temporarily relieves the psychological pain of stress.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Elevated levels of 'frustration' results in greater incidence of aggression--certain environmental stimuli 'trigger' the release of built-up aggression, as well as exacerbating circumstances which elevate the level of stress and lower the threshold or level of normal resistance to release of its expression. This kind of frustration is the 'stress' which results from the lack of ecological fit between the organism and its environment or else it is the result of 'perceived' relative deprivation in comparison with peer 'polity' reference groups--results of 'elevated' expectations which are unmet in comparison to others, or triggered by a sudden downturn of expected events or an unexpected loss or lack of an expected gain. Frustration is experienced when expectations go unmet. Relative deprivation and rising expectations are the result of perceived structural inequalities vis-a vis a dominant or competing reference group. Frustration is preeminently a psycho physiological phenomena--it is one of the many ways the mind can influence the body and the body can in turn influence the mind. Expectations may be based upon a relative value orientation and relative deprivation is based on the knowledge of possible non-deprivation derived from the experiences of reference groups--the knowledge that continual 'deprivation' is no longer a necessary reality, but the experience of frustration and the 'need for aggression' is very organically real. Frustration can also result from what sociologists refer to as interpositional structural ambiguity of status role identity--the stress and strain of being caught in the push pull of overlapping structural hierarchies or in the interstices of power. The result of becoming incorporated within a global political economy and of restricted access to material affluence, education, opportunity and of learning that other people are undeprived, is based upon perceived social structural inequality and asymmetry in structural relationships and leads to social conflict and revolution.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Sociologists see aggression as an innate instinctual human phenomenon. Yet acts of aggression, as symbolic expressions and as frustrated attempts to 'correct' problems of environmental misfit are largely 'learned' responses. Aggression is an expressive mode may be cultivated and elevated to greater levels of violence, as occurs in the media. Children learn the expression of aggression from peers, family and role models their society provides them. Oedipus theory is based upon the sublimation of aggression and the internalization of its control, and its expressive association with sexuality. Direct forms of aggression are regressive and in most social contexts are maladaptive and dysfunctional. Aggression becomes displaced psychologically upon neutral or convenient ways or objects in indirect forms of its expression. Its manifestation is associated with obsessive compulsive and impulse control disorders. In its sublimation, it may be either reserved or channeled towards out groups who are symbolically villainized or incriminated or else it is turned inwardly upon the self and becomes an inverted form of self violence culminating in suicide. The sublimation and displacement of aggression is symbolically mediated and allows its channeling into constructive or destructive or neutral 'structures' or paradigms. These 'structures' that are founded upon the sublimation of aggression through internal control and conformity to authority are authoritarian.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">However innate aggressiveness is, its style of expression, its transmission and the acquisition and elaboration of aggression is enculturated and transmitted through the elaboration of cultural symbol systems. Violence begets more violence, and acquired aggressiveness begets violence. The socialization for aggression is institutionally embedded in constraints, direct and indirect, and sanctions, positive or negative and in the norms and ethos of a particular social structure. By its socialization, aggressive drives are channeled into appropriate symbolic outlets of expression, and this prevents aggression from rending in group social relations or undermine the symbolic hierarchy of social authority. Its cultivation fosters an atmosphere of social security and of active involvement in the rituals which mediate difference and conflict. Aggression is learned through imitation, internalization, punishment, enforced restrictions and competition. People are constrained and coerced into aggressiveness through manipulation and reinforcement, through rationalized protection and defense of the ego, through 'trials' of ritualized suffering, challenge and endurance. Aggression is the expression of power in the world--its feeling, motivation and energy.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The challenge of social cohesion and conformity is to transmute and channel independent forms of personal willpower and direct aggression into appropriate forms of social empowerment and indirect expression of aggression, of an extensive form of personalized natural power and transforming it into an intensive form of social, derivative power.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Sexual drives and aggressiveness are closely linked--instinctually, hormonally and in the brain. Biological paradigms or fight or flight are tied to mating rituals and other forms of symbolic behavior. It is no wonder that the social repression of sexuality, seen as polluting, taboo, immoral is to be associated with the sublimation, cultivation, elaboration and projection of aggression onto out groups or members of out groups. The frustration of sexuality is a social mechanism for the indirect fostering and channeling of aggressive drives. Such a mechanism reinforces group solidarity and is a mechanism of control of social structure and reproduction and allows for the build up and subsequent targeting and triggering of pent-up aggressive impulses upon socially acceptable targets.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Aggressiveness can be socially transmitted, acquired and targeted in acceptable ways. The indirect release of aggression upon out groups promotes internal solidarity, cohesiveness and conformity. The coupling of sexuality and aggressiveness is a useful means of augmenting the motivational drives which then can be socially channeled in constructive or destructive ways. The frustration of sexual drives, and its sublimation into other domains of interest helps to heighten levels of aggression. The evocative power of sexual symbolisms can be transferred to the reinforcement of symbolisms of aggression. Sexual symbolisms can surreptitiously focus and direct aggressive impulses in deliberate and controllable ways.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Psychological growth of personality is critically linked to socialization and enculturation in relation to others in the world. The formation of psychological 'ego' as a socially interdependent expression of personality is referred to as 'identification'. Identification is a 'psycho social' process of ego development, having inseparable psychological and social components of its process. It is largely a dialectical process of self in relation to significant others. Identification of one's ego identity is defined vis-a' vis one's social structural positionality and in terms of relations with significant others and/or symbols of group identity. Identification is a consequence of the psychological internalization of the constraints and sanctions, values, norms, attitudes, aversions and predispositions predominant within one's world--a person's primary reference group. From a social standpoint, successful internalization has the happy and convenient result of precluding the need to maintain external social controls or of external mechanisms of behavioral reinforcement--the actions of the individual in relation to social life will be rendered expectable and predictable in a positive way.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Negative stereotypes, associated with people who have failed to successfully internalize and identify with the predominant ethos and nomos of the group, or who have identified negatively and 'externalized' such norms and standards of conduct, are always associated with unpredictability and unexpectable and dangerous behaviors. Such people are prone to behave in aberrant and abnormal ways, and are therefore preordained uncontrollable and potentially dangerous as their inappropriate behavior threatens social order.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Internalization is not promoted without its costs to an individual or to the group, as it tends to separate the sense of individual identity from its own natural ground of being in the world, by the superimposition of artificial values and secondary orientations. This has the consequence of frustrating creative development and independent thinking and renders the individual, in motivation, interests, inclinations, attitudes, habits, subordinate to and subservient to and dependent upon the world view from which the social norms and values are derived. It 'fixes' and 'frames' an individual in a relative inflexible structural position. People become prisoners of their own unconscious psyche that attempts to deal with this condition--they become either rebels, silent conformists or sycophants of the predominant world view which predetermines their 'frames' of being and experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this matter people cannot prevent or help themselves in their controlled behavior, or in uncontrolled reactions to it, not even recognize in themselves what it is that so directs and controls their sense of being in the world. This vital control is blocked out, rendered transparent and invisible, covered over by something quite sophisticated systems of rationalization and intellectualization which protects their sense of ego identity and their implicit world view, from contradiction which might threaten or undermine it.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Internalization has different consequences for different people--some have internalized more rigidly than others, and different people adopt different kinds of ego defense mechanisms to allow them to cope with the consequences of their own inflexibility in new environments. Different kinds of status role positions beget different forms and ways of identification.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Psycho social identification and the formation of ego in the world is referred to as an individual's 'status role' identity vis a 'vis a given corporate social structure and organization. Psychological ego identity is wrapped up with a person's nomothetic social status, or positionality within the social order, whether hierarchical or symmetrical, and with that person's functional role within that order. A person's status is critically linked to the role that person performs and to the social recognition and reinforcement such a role entails. Behavioral modification and reinforcement, in terms of 'professionalization' or 'professional socialization and specialization' of the ego focuses upon the manipulation of an individual's status role identity through sanctioned and constrained reinforcement of the processes of internalization and repression.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is through such status role identity that social structure as a normative and nomothetic order is primarily reinforced. Status role identity is critically linked to social group boundary maintenance mechanisms and symbolisms, whether internal or external. Threats to group boundary identity constitutes threats to an individual's status role identity within the group and threats to an individual's status role identity constitutes a threat to the social order.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is understandable that the ego defense mechanisms of world view--repression/projection, rationalization and intellectualization, compartmentalization and dichotomization--are also important mechanisms in maintaining and reinforcing the social structure and in mediating group boundary identity in the world, and that symbols and mechanisms of social reinforcement of group boundary identify figure prominently in the normal socialization or 'normalization' of an individual's status role identity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The psycho social processes of identification and internalization are related to the process of compartmentalization of the ego into separate domains of being, usually 'front' and 'back' regions, in which a person's ideals, sense of perfection, strengths, positive values and talents, etc. are relegated to the 'front' or public domain and the individual's weaknesses, wrong doings, negative values, etc. are relegated to the back regions where they may be easily hidden from view and denied. Compartmentalization requires maintaining a boundary or a sense of distance between the two domains, which consumes a great deal of psychic energy expressed in the form of inner conflict, dissonance and tension. Compartmentalization is more necessary in public regions of social space, in which all of one's ego defense mechanisms are in place to prevent the two domains from merging or becoming mixed. One's guard can be let down 'behind closed doors' and the sense of self can become relatively uncompartmentalized. This is a more 'relaxed' state of being which does not require as much energy to maintain. The stronger the degree of internalization of social constraint and values, the more compartmentalized a person becomes--complete internalization is a completely compartmentalized identity in which the defense mechanisms are always in place.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Compartmentalization of a person's self identity in the world has several important consequences. First, there is a resulting dichotomization of reality, which undercuts one's total world view. Placing values into separate boxes or compartments in one's own being leads to a compartmentalization of reality and experience into dichotomized, contradictive boxes of good and bad, right and wrong, strong and weak, positive and negative, etc. This dichotomization of world view underlies its mythological and ideological character, and it is all pervasive. There will be a strong need to find a sense of symmetry and isometry between one's internal and external worlds. If follows from this that individual's who have not, for one reason or another, strongly compartmentalized their internal lives, will tend not to dichotomize the external world and to have a world view which tends to be non-ideological.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The second consequence of compartmentalization of the internal world and dichotomization of the external order is that there is a resulting need to unconsciously reintegrate the separate domains of being, to reunite them and to recover a lost sense of integrity and completeness. There is a pervasive sense of being incomplete, unwhole, alienated, alone, unintegrated which leads to an often futile and frequently failed attempt to rediscover 'lost parts' of the self.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The psychological processes of internalization and compartmentalization rest upon the mechanism of 'psychological repression'--the holding back or keeping down of natural expression or development of devalued aspects of the self, through strict behavioral controls, reinforcing ideas, impulses, etc. painful to the conscious mind (ego identity) into the unconscious where they still modify behavior and remain dynamic, and the prevention of such ideas, impulses, etc. from rising to the level of consciousness. Feelings of weakness, inadequacy, insecurity, negatively valued emotions, feelings, expressions, traits, habits, pre-dispositions, become forced by psychological constriction and social constraint into the back regions of the unconscious.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Such repression has certain inevitable consequences. First it leads to over controlled or constrained expression of self in non-spontaneous overly rationalized ways.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Secondly, such repression entails unconscious 'projection' of those negatively devalued traits onto a counter reference other, a member of some 'out group'. Projection is an almost automatic, reflexive outcome of repression--it is a form of indirect expression of what is repressed upon targeted scapegoats, expression which is only constrained by the boundaries, relative distance and difference of such out groups. The fact of projection is as transparent and invisible as the sense of necessary repression is strong and requires rationalization. Repression and the resulting need for projection often entails finding an acceptable target or a scapegoat, which entails the devaluation or negation of another individual or group. Psychological projection is the externalization of a thought or a feeling such that it appears to have objective reality. It entails finding appropriate symbols in the environment which conveniently and adequately serve the purposes of projection or indirect expression of what is repressed.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Psychological repression/projection is associated with social repression/projection. Group identity and constraints become incorporated through socialization and identification into the individual--what is socially repressed becomes internalized as psychological repression, and what is psychological repressed becomes expressed through social relationship as social repression. Furthermore, psychological projection finds convenient symbols in social out groups which are targets of social projection.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Repression/projection as psycho social mechanisms of internalization/identification and compartmentalization/dichotomization are the basis of rationalization and intellectualization which characterize world view. Such mechanisms allows us to understand how rationalization differs from rationality, and how intellectualization differs from intellect, as ego defense mechanisms characterized by cognitive dissonance, the need for non-contradiction, totality, denial, etc.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Repression/projection and status role/group boundary identity are mechanisms for maintaining a world view which symbolically ties together into a unity ego identity and group identity and leads to a well documented phenomenon of in group/out group consciousness. Such consciousness is characterized by some definite traits.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The out group is the symbolic scapegoat and victim/target of projection. It is negative devalued and excluded from communication. The in group is positively valued, and the in group language become exclusive facilitating internal communication but hindering between group communication. A sense of special identity is fostered, an illusion of superiority and prerogative over the out group. Hierarchy and solidarity of the in group is reinforced through ritual and symbolic practices. The presence of an out group is not just convenient, but unconsciously mandatory and imperative--internal cohesion, solidarity and hierarchy of power could not be reinforced without the critical 'absence' of an out group which serves as a projective target of internal psycho social repressions. Within group differences are repressed and within group conformity or similarities, or 'identity' is emphasized and between group differences are emphasized and between group identity de-emphasized.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">At the same time, the individual variation of the out group becomes 'collectivized' as a group stereotype--'if you've seen one, you've seen them all' where as the individual variation of the in group becomes emphasized and highlighted--'the organization of familiarity'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Status role and group boundary identity, in group/out group consciousness and world view become symbolically expressed and articulated in systems of belief and behavior which are referred to as systems of collective representation--symbolisms and symbol systems which represent identity and ideologically express and reinforce group vales and consciousness. Symbols of collective representation serve to 'normalize' and 'naturalize' such relations and to 'sacralize' the identity of relation. They express the collectivity of identity, and emphasize the collectivizing function of symbolic identity. Collective representations orient 'world view' and ground it in 'objective reality'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Compartmentalization and repression/projection entail symbolic dichotomization of social reality between the 'reference significant other' and the 'counter reference significant other'. The reference other is 'sacred' or endowed with 'sacred qualities' as a paragon of the collective representation or embodiment of the paradigm, in that it is an in group symbol of primary reference and emulation. It may be an authority figure, a normative ideal or archetype or an abstraction expressed symbolically. The 'counter reference' significant other is the archetypal or stereotypical embodiment of the negative projections of the self, characteristic of the 'out group'. These contraposed symbolisms are functionally complementary to one another--they require logically and analogically the mutual presence of both in the dichotomization of social reality. The significant reference other is the symbolic embodiment of the 'perfect self'--an externalized introjection of the positive attributes of the ego, while the counter reference other is an anti-type of the 'imperfect other', while the counter reference other is an anti-type, the internalized projection of the unconscious 'unself'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Prejudice, pre-judgment of others, is based upon ignorance about them. Ignorance is not only the lack of information but 'ignoring' such information through selective omission and perception. It is necessary that we do not know others in order that we may remain prejudiced about them. The insidiousness of ignorance is not that it is based on a lack of reliable, valid information, but that it is based on an unwillingness to learn about or a resistance to such information. All prejudice implies the rule of ignorance. Prejudice is self serving in a person's or a group's world view--it reinforces its own ignorance and its own preconceptions of the way the world is and ought to be.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Such prejudice as pre-judgment of others entails that we superimpose standards of moral judgment on others which are independent of their actions or being, culture or history--their being and behavior is ultimately denied or devalued as unnecessary or unimportant in our constructions and preconceptions about them. Prejudice allows us to see and look at the world the way we want to see it, unmitigated by the reality of the other--the reality of the other is made to fit into our own world without references to the other's values, actions, experiences or realities. We then do not have to consult them or bother to inquire of them or their experiences to validate our views about them. Our prejudices are self validating by our ignorance.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Prejudice is a mechanism for maintaining, protecting or preserving the status quo of hierarchical power relations and in group/out group boundary maintenance. Prejudice and ignorance leads to patterns of socially sanctioned social avoidance and persecution, which maintains the state of ignorance in order that our prejudice might not be compromised by contradictory information.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Such prejudice and ignorance is based upon selective perception and preconception. We have preconceived ideas about what another person is like, or about good or bad traits, and we then see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear, and selectively choose to pay attention to what conveniently reinforces our own world view. This may happen not only consciously but unconsciously. Selective perception and preconception is based upon unconscious projection of things hidden in ourselves. Ignorance and prejudice, as psychological resistance and refusal have reasons which are rooted in our own character.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Prejudice and ignorance find reinforcement in 'labeling' and stereotyping of others. Labels reify abstract realities as if these were objectively real, and allow us to locate these 'realities' in others by way of calling them names. It reifies people into the qualities of labels. Labeling implies in group/out group consciousness, and creates thresholds to passing/perception between groups. Labeling reinforces world view and modifies our perception of reality. Once stuck, labels are difficult to remove. Labeling is a symbolic form of linguistic tattooing, a form of dysphemization which follows Gresham's law that bad meaning tends to crowd out the good. Labeling leads to self fulfilling prophecy, and to the 'I told you so' syndrome of picking out and emphasizing actions or traits which reinforce the realism of the label, while ignoring realities which may contradict it. This is a kind of 'blaming the victim' which projects the lack of personal responsibility and victimizes the victim of our prejudice as a 'self fulfilling prophecy'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Labeling creates and maintains stereotypes--any unvarying forms or patterns, fixed or conventional expression, notion, character, mental pattern, paradigm, etc. having no individuality, as though cast from a single mold. The onus of stereotyping is that they create psychological and social low self esteem which leads to self defeating patterns of behavior which reinforce and help to perpetuate the stereotypes or to exaggerated acts of over compensation which have a similar net result.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Collective low self esteem is a result of group stereotypes in which role models, dominant symbols, leadership traits and figures are devalued or demoted into submissive, subordinate, subservient, exploitable and victimizable status in relation to foreign, alien or antithetical models of dominance and superiority. It leads to a cultural inferiority complex which tends to reinforce itself--losers seek out and find the company of other losers, and prevent one another from escaping the vicious cycle of low motivation and low esteem, while winners are allowed to 'choke' into failure by the withdrawal of social support.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Ignorance and prejudice lead inevitably to social/structural bias and discrimination which reinforces patterns of inequality and dominance inherent in the world view and world order such labeling and stereotyping begets. Discrimination is the behavioral exclusion or marginalization of members or of out groups from the normal social participation as in group members or 'citizens' and from in group status role identity. Discrimination prevents access to power, resources and social relations which are the basis of psycho social well being and adaptive success. Social discrimination leads to verbal abuse, name calling, derogation and slander. Structural discrimination is the bureaucratic omission or exclusion from due process and the screens of obfuscation and the removal of screens of support and opportunity. Bureaucracy encapsulates and colonizes the out group while it protects the interests of and privileges the access to resources of the in group.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Bias is built into the world view and world order which favors in group identity over our group identity. It leads to ethnocentrism and other forms of prejudiced world view.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Scapegoating is a targeting of aggression upon acceptable out groups--it is a way of focusing hate and antagonism outside of the normal social order to prevent built up anger and aggression from causing internal conflict and disorder. It is a way of symbolically reinforcing conformity by paradigmatic intimidation, by setting an example. Scapegoating is a way of blaming the victim--not only is the out group victimized by aggression, but the negative and devalued traits projected on to them and made to stick like labels, legitimates the use of aggression and projects blame and responsibility for the aggression upon the targeted out group. Scapegoating is a necessary mechanism for maintaining group identity and solidarity, especially when internal social relations are strained or stressed or conflictual or highly competitive and spurious. A competitive social ethos entails scapegoating. One form of scapegoating is witchcraft accusation and attribution of magic and sorcery. As a mechanism of aggression and of 'blaming the victim' and for reinforcing social solidarity it is clear how scapegoating in the form of witchcraft accusation functions. Scapegoating is in a sense the opposite of catharsis as the release of built up tension--the relieving or purifying of emotions by art, or the alleviation of fears, problems, jealousies and complexes by bringing them to consciousness and giving them due expression. Collective representations of out groups, in the form of stereotypes provide a convenient form of symbolism by which catharsis may be effected. Scapegoating can be seen to be a form of 'negative catharsis'. The release or resolution of potential aggression or built up tension allows a lower level equilibrium which restore social relations to a new harmony, however temporarily. Scapegoating, whether witchcraft or some other form, is a social coping mechanisms which allows tension in the environmental misfit of everyday social lie which would otherwise be threatening to the social order, to surface in a symbolically acceptable form and be given indirect expression, alleviating the tension. It is a conservation mechanism--a first order negative feedback mechanism.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In scapegoating, in discrimination, labeling, etc. there is a hidden evil in that usually individuals promote such social processes or control their outcome for their own personal profit or empowerment at the sacrifice of other victims of the process. This is hidden, and always done deliberately. It is a way of manipulating the symbology of the structure of the system to personal advantage, through the systematic victimization of others. In this way also these mechanisms tend to promote and preserve the status quo in power relationships as the people in hierarchical positions of authority are the ones who are profiting by the legitimization and propagation of such processes.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Values which emphasize competitiveness, hierarchy, authority and dominance, reinforce a world view based upon the efficacy of conflict and power to control. Conflict is a consequence of competition, on which the rewards of success are limited, and one party's or person's gain is another's loss. Values of competitiveness and hierarchy capitalize on the promoting and channeling of aggressiveness into indirect ways of social expression. In such a predominant value orientation, success as the reward of competition is highly valued. Cooperation, equality, symmetry or reciprocity as an antithetical vale orientation is demoted and devalued as a subservient way of being--cooperation in party's or team efforts only enhance and promote competitive success of the whole group at the expense of the individual's own personal identity. Our society values highly competition and devalues cooperation in schools, in work and play, in past time events, in virtually every aspect of work and play. Promotion of competitiveness and superiority reinforces our success ethics and our world view based upon social selection of 'survival of the fittest'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Antagonism as a form of direct aggression is related to agonism as a form of sexual competition--antagonism, as a kind of conflictual outcome of agonistic competition, becomes a way of reinforcing the structure of relations between people and between groups.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Hate and hostility are expressions of frustrated aggression projected onto marginalized members of out groups. It entails victimization of members of inferior out groups as a means of expression of antagonism and aggression, and as a means of negatively reinforcing the competitive success ethic. We hate losers, and we are hostile to cooperation which precludes competitiveness. This is the underlying fascism of our capitalist world view which promoted self interest at the sacrifice of others and concomitantly the interests of the system at the expense of other people's 'systems'. Self promotion precludes a personal sense of moral responsibility to the collective well being of humanity. Such an enlightened sense of social responsibility is a sign of weakness, a symptom of failure, a mark for systematic exclusion and even a 'villainized' threat of 'evil' communism. It remains the social prerogative of the elite and the chosen.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The basis of ethnocentrism in the world as a pan cultural phenomenon of world view is to be found in the promotion of power, self interest and authoritarianism, which plays upon the psychology of empowerment for a select few and depowerment for excluded others. The structure of ethnocentrism is derived as particular culture historical symbolisms as instantiations of the psychology of power and the authoritarian character. Ethnocentric focus and the force of enculturation are determined by and predetermine the social locus of power--it provides a center and concentricity of symbolism about which world view and the sense of collective order can be cultivated and maintained.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The psycho social process of personality development, ego identity and socialization described so far are fundamentally processes of the inculcation of the authoritarian character in individuals vis a vis their dominant cultural ethos and nomos. Authoritarianism is universal in human personality in the sense that the Freudian thesis of the Oedipus complex is a thesis about the internalization of male authority in the formation of the ego--it in a psycho social problem of authority. Authoritarianism has been described psychologically and sociologically but has never been directly broached as an anthropological concern.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Authoritarianism s the psychological internalization of the symbols and values of authority, and the conventional constraints and repressions associated with authority, and the internal conflict which results from this internalization and which creates rigidity, rebellion, the need for control, defense mechanisms and anxiety, and leads to other personality disorders. Sociopathy and counter cultural rebellion from authority are expressions and reactions to authoritarianism and the problem it leads to. We are all authoritarian to some extent--it is a question of how much and in what ways. It is a greater dilemma for some than for others, and others develop more morally mature ways for dealing with it. The psychological problem of authority is part of the central problematic of the psychology of power. Authoritarianism is a psychological preoccupation with power which frequently results in the perversions of its expression.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The manifestations of psychological authoritarianism, of the authoritarian character, takes several distinct forms and has many forms of expression. Common manifestations include fear or deficiency motivation, closed mindedness, symbolic dependency, rigidity and inflexibility in dealing with change, sexual repression, self denial or a preoccupation with ego, high levels of cognitive dissonance and emotional anxiety and a kind of 'evil' fascination with death.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Whatever its components, psychological authoritarianism is functionally associated with forms of sociological authoritarianism or the formation of 'authoritarian power structures' which may exist as a shadow organization within other organization frameworks, and which inculcated, promote and attract authoritarian personalities and cultivates authoritarians among its constituency. Such power structure exist for their own ends, for the end of 'power' and the perversion and moral corruption which power produces in human social relations. Authoritarian power structures accrete authoritarianism and power and lead to the problems associated with these.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Authoritarianism and its resulting power structures are a central existential and ethical problem confronting humankind today, one which must be effectively dealt with theoretically, methodologically and ideologically. It requires an elucidation of 'non-authoritarian personality' and of non-authoritarian power structures'. It is wondered whether the so called 'egalitarian personality' is the opposite of the authoritarian character or whether the 'non-authoritarianism' might have other attributes and traits and implications for personality development and social structuration which lie beyond the moral dilemma of equality. One of the predominant values of authoritarianism is the principle of social hierarchy--a belief in the efficacy of controlling power. Can power be articulated in or social world in fundamentally non-hierarchical ways.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Authoritarianism has been associated with low achievement motivation and with feelings of low self esteem. It can be argued that the association between the archetypical authoritarian character and low self esteem is fundamental to the understanding of both kinds of psychological phenomena--authoritarianism and low self esteem are caught in a cybernesis in which one leads to and comes from the other. Furthermore, just as authoritarians tend to flock together to socially reinforce one another and become caught into webs of relational interdependency which reinforce one another's identity and bolster each other's self esteem within the power structure of authority. The 'sense of being at the bottom' feelings of inferiority lead to a need to feel superior and to be on top, which are manifestations of authoritarianism. The need to feel better than another sets a person up for recursive failure--self fulfilling frustration--which enhances one's feeling of inferiority.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Chronic feelings of failure and fear of failure within a hierarchical arena creates a strong need to over compensate such fear and feelings by symbolically adhering to symbols of success and power, and also to a need to create, foster and maintain the existence of devalued out groups upon which such feelings and fears can be displaced and projected.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The key characteristic of authoritarianism is the preoccupation with the principle of hierarchy (hierarchism) in which elements of a group are ranked into a top-down relational structure in which dominance/subordination and inequality and relational asymmetry is stressed and symbolically, linguistically, behaviorally reinforced in social relationships. Preoccupation with hierarchy reinforces the social structure of hierarchy, and social hierarchy reinforces its psychological correlate. Authoritarianism leads to a dependence upon symbols of power and authority which reinforce such hierarchy and which devalues or downplays principles of egalitarianism.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Such hierarchism creates a predominant nomothetic arrangement of social structure in which people are normally classified, categorized, ranked and identified within a cross cutting comparative hierarchical taxonomy and are regularly, normally dealt with on the basis of such categories, labels and classes. This leads to an objective reification of people on their basis of their rank order status within the system--individual identity becomes subordinate to and dependent upon social hierarchy. Within such a nomothetic framework, the idiographic identity if the individual is systematically ignored and undermined. There is a denial and repression of intersubjectivity, longitudinal experience and personality differences and individual uniqueness and symbolically these become the characteristics of weakness, non-conformity and abnormality, and are projected onto appropriate out groups.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Embedded values of hierarchism are related to another phenomena of the growth and development of bureaucratic organization within social structures. The life cycle of organizations as social historical movements tends to follow a sequence of stages from a preliminary revolutionary, anti-structural period, lead by a prophet or a core group of revolutionary aesthetics. As such movements gain power and organize themselves, they tend to enter into a phase of corporate organization structure which becomes progressively routinized. Eventually such organizations ossify into top heavy bureaucratic organizations, with the original emphasis upon egalitarian values gradually becoming transformed to values of hierarchy. With the ossification of such institutions, their adaptation to environmental changes decreases and control or prevention of change becomes their primary purpose. The time is ripe for another 'fissioning' process of a new revolutionary splinter group which may separate on the basis of relatively minor doctrinal differences. The cycle begins again. Much of human history of social movements is one of a continuous process of branching and solidification and ossification.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There seem to be several reasons for this cyclical patterns of the spread and proliferation of social movements. First, successful movements grow and proliferate while unsuccessful one will die out while still relatively small. As successful movement expand they adopt organizational structure and associated 'centers' of ideology in order to cope with the enormity of its constituency. It stratifies at several levels, and promotes more hierarchical relations and values. Such organizations become 'grand and impersonal' and often fail to any longer meet the emotional and social needs of its basic constituency in any but the most limited or specialized manner. As it grows to encompass a broader range of diversity of people, there is more possibility for the formation of smaller, interpersonal splinter organization to form at the margins of its control, to crystallize in social organization and begin to challenge the power of its parent organization.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Bureaucracy itself begins to proliferate within an organizational framework, and as it does it becomes less and less efficient and more top heavy and parasitic to its population base. As it stratifies into multiple levels of decision making there is a tendency for lower rungs to specialize in conflict mediation, control, delegation of negative authority and the preservation of the status quo of the power hierarchy. As it proliferates and stratifies it becomes less effective in dealing with face to face encounters except in highly formalized and hierarchical ways. An organization saddled with an overgrown bureaucracy tends to ossify and become less flexible and adaptive to change.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Once bureaucracy grows it becomes more and more difficult to control completely or to diminish it. The attraction of bureaucracy is the limited security it offers. Bureaucracy is also the most inflexible to change and maintain attitudes of 'false consciousness' or are ideological 'true believers' in the efficacy and reality of their 'system'. They are instituted with the codification and enforcement of a legal structure and laws tend to increase in number and in elaboration, and laws are easier to institute than to repeal. Also the primary purpose of bureaucracy is the mediation of conflict on behalf of the interests of the system and such mediation is the source of stress and high levels of cognitive dissonance and require extreme levels of compartmentalization.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It goes without say that bureaucratic structures tend to be authoritarian power structures and that authoritarian power structures tend to become highly bureaucratized in function. It also goes without saying that bureaucratic organizations tend to accrete a great deal of authoritarianism into its rank structure. It promotes values of routine operational efficiency and behavioral/attitudinal conformity, as its primary functions of control, conflict mediation and preservation of the status quo of power relations are best served by these values. Shows of individuality, of independence, of internal conflict are regarded as 'rocking the boat' and threatening to the status quo of power, and are therefore demoted or persecuted as nonconformity or criminality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Bureaucratic structures tend to become 'mediocracies' as they tend to promote mediocrity rather than talent or ability up its rank structure. Mediocre people make the best conformers who are the most routine operationally efficient and the least questioning of the ethos of their system. With the rise of mediocracy is also a rise of authoritarianism, maladaptiveness to change, organizational inflexibility and the promotion of sycophancy and blind ideology. In a mediocracy it can be bad to know too much, ask too many questions, out perform superiors, do 'too good' of a job, be overly productive or have too many talents or pre-occupations which interfere with the routine. Conformity tends to become valued above ability, and impression management becomes promoted over actual performance.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is another hidden facet to the rise of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy serves as an official front for screens of obfuscation of opportunity and manipulation of power behind closed doors. Bureaucracy disguises the actual articulation of power through insider networks by which changes are actually mediated. The extreme degree of compartmentalization creates a whole organizational 'back region' in which laws, rules, rights, routines are routinely usurped or disregarded in order to 'get things done'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is a formation of a circle of deceit and a common front of routine denial. In such organizations, social relations tend to be spurious for the sake of manipulation and convenience. People in such organizations are ultimately self interested in the promotion of their own hidden or private interests via the mechanism of the system. They are the most frustrated when their own expectations are nor met and their own needs and demands are nor served. Sacrifice of their own personal identity and conformity to organizational ethos is the price they pay for membership, social status and advancement within the system. Even 'true believers' who have lost personal identity for the sake of their identification with the system are surreptitiously most selfish in their expectations of what the system will do for them. Thus the back region hides the competition, the interpersonal strife, the 'back stabbing', routine scapegoating , brown nosing and victimization which bureaucracy inevitably eventuates in.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Authoritarianism is mostly an unconscious process. This is what makes it so invidious, so transparent and invisible, and so prone to hypocritical and pretentious presumptions and so difficult to eradicate when it becomes organized into power structures. This makes authoritarianism surprisingly easy to mask and cover over and conceal from the critical scrutiny of others--unconscious authoritarianism appeals to and speak to the unconscious authoritarianism of others in a paralinguistic, contextual and symbolic dialogue which is concealed within and hidden by the conscious rationalizations which might take neutral or even authoritarian forms of discourse. Although there are manifestations or authoritarianism which are conscious, its structure predetermines behavior and thought at an unconscious and contextual level of constraint. The paradox is that authoritarians act and react guided by dictates which they themselves are at best only scarcely aware of. There is a conscious need to cover or block out or avoid this self recognition of the ethical implications of their own behavior and attitudes. This unconsciousness of authoritarianism is what confers the fascination and preoccupation with symbols of power and authority. It allows people to behave aggressively toward others without their full conscious apperceptive recognition of their own aggressiveness. Unconsciousness is the consequence of the repression and denial of the causes of authoritarianism in their own weakness and character. There is a need to appear 'strong' and 'unemotional' which covers over weakness and a subconscious cauldron of emotionality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Within authoritarian power structures there can be whole underground networks of authoritarian discourse which goes on secretively and is even subconsciously reinforced by peoples attitudes and behaviors. The paradox is also that basically authoritarian personalities can so mask their authoritarianism with such sophistication that they appear or seem to be quite non-authoritarian on the conscious, surface level of interaction.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Secret services, covert operations, closed door policies and politics, and behind the scene manipulations and the maintenance of circles of deceit, grapevines, plants among people and ears in walls, are all sociological manifestations of the communication and collective unconscious of authoritarian power structures. Voters may be manipulated on the unconscious level and can be guided to vote according to their unconscious inclinations inspite of their conscious, rational disagreement. As authoritarians, we may know better, but feel compelled to act in authoritarian ways inspite of our conscious awareness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Words and symbols convey messages at both the conscious and unconscious levels--messages which may be mutually contradictory or covertly complementary when the conscious manifest level is configured against a broader latent unconscious context. It is at the unconscious level that authoritarianism is typically transmitted and elaborated. While we may be entertained consciously, we may be quite unaware of the unconscious messages being conveyed which may provoke anxiety or trigger aggression.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Symbols, while mediating the conscious and unconscious levels of communication, validate or valorize unconscious vales by their juxtapositioning within conscious arrangements. Propaganda and argot typically carry unconscious loadings of authoritarian values. We may enjoy the entertainment but remain unconsciously, or subliminally aware of the stereotypes we are accepting or that are being expressed. Unconscious drives empower symbolisms, vitalizing them with importance and relevance.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Symbols may be simple and crude, or quite elaborate and sophisticated, appealing to different levels of mind, different degrees of conscious and unconscious integration. Symbolic repression is a cause of psychological disorder--people adjusted to more sophisticated symbolisms can no longer find crude symbolisms adequate to meditate the conscious and unconscious, the ego and the environmental context. The de-symbolization of downward mobility, reverse migration, marginalization, and the accompanying psychic disintegration--symbol systems once culturally relevant may no longer be adequate for one who has 'grown' out of them, who are tuned to different levels, kinds and styles of power symbolism. Symbols from past epochs and periods are usually transparent and nonfunctional in their unconscious appeal and manipulative power. They no longer mediate for us--they lack their relevant historical context and appear trite, old fashioned and out of date. They appear naïve or 'see through' and obvious. In a sense societies elaborate different forms of symbolisms to different degrees and the unconscious repressions become more sophisticated and elaborated. Movement between cultures reveals the discrepancies in the values which are symbolically reintegrated.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is the unconsciousness of authoritarianism which makes it so difficult to identify and account for and so intractable to analysis and reform--though it may be pervasive and predominant in social environments, we may remain only marginally aware of it, and though we may strongly sense its presence, we may remain quite unable to focus upon it as a central problematic inherent to a particular social situation. Largely we lack the understanding and vocabulary by which to frame and objective understanding of authoritarianism as a psychological and social problematic or as a 'paradigm' of power.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Consciousness must uncover and reveal the unconscious ground of authoritarianism in order to exert control over it--which is the only means of getting a healthy handle upon the problem. There is a natural and normal resistance to uncovering things in the unconscious especially as it threatens the 'status quo' and awakens the insecurities which authoritarianism copes with. Authoritarianism represents a frequently predominating and overwhelming power to control the unconscious and to cause the consciousness to conceal and cover over the unconscious.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The egalitarian personality is frequently contraposed as the opposite of the authoritarian character, and yet strictly speaking egalitarianism is actually the opposite of hierarchism, but one dimension of the authoritarian complex. Egalitarianism is actually only one aspect of the non-authoritarian character. Other aspects include low level of aggressiveness, non-competitiveness, high self esteem, relative open-mindedness, a 'reality orientation' and a wide acceptance of and tolerance for interpersonal difference. Egalitarianism is not so much a personality of values held to be basic to a democratic and egalitarian society. It can often disguise a great deal of hypocrisy. It is interesting that the model of egalitarian personality is often that of an enlightened, liberal minded, Jewish college professor. Such a stereotype can often conceal a paternalism of the 'law of the father' and a 'binding over of the son' as an unconscious form of authoritarianism in which authority is viewed as a kind, gentle, firm and parental in relation to children.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There are people that are relatively free of authoritarian traits and who have a rather relaxed preoccupation with symbols of authority and power. Such people no longer need to define issues of power in social relations, with secure egos not threatened by nomothetic comparison with others, in terms of authoritarian frames of reference. They have brought to conscious awareness the unconscious dimensions of authoritarianism in their own personalities and such dimensions become visible in other people's personalities as well. Non-authoritarianism is not so much an overemphasis upon equality, if in name only, as 'egalitarianism' implies, though this is one important aspect of the non-authoritarian trait complex. Rather it is a de-emphasis upon identity and difference and a need to establish some form of reciprocal symmetry or give and take in social interrelationships. There is a tendency to deal with others in more personalistic, inter-subjective terms of idiographic personality and longitudinal experience rather than in terms of their status role identity. Status symbolisms are relative unimportant or neutral to the non-authoritarian, rather they are more in tune with the basic 'goodness' or qualities and attitudes of others as separate individual personalities, regardless of or in reference to group identity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">They do not prejudice or discriminate against others on the basis of status or appearance. These people tend to have a more idiographic orientation in their own life trajectories and in the understanding of and relating to others, rather than a categorizing framework in which they are measuring themselves and others in comparison and ranking.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Understanding others is a process of 'getting to know them'. People become interpreted against their own relational backgrounds in reference to personal life history, as they have been molded by past experiences or influenced by past events or environments. Such people may have systems of belief and entertain ideologies but they are relatively non-exclusive systems of belief--they are will to consider alternative viewpoints and to see the value of alternative orientations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The non-authoritarian does not seek power in its dependent social form, but seeks an independence from the control of such power, and an independent form of self empowerment in terms which are self actualizing but not premised upon the domination of others. The non-authoritarian values a strong sense of normative and intellectual independence and action, and stresses a moral code of self responsibility.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Relatively few people are either extremely authoritarian or non-authoritarian, most people have aspects of their personality which are relatively authoritarian and other dimensions which are relatively non-authoritarian--and the differences in these traits varies widely between people, as do the forms of expression which such traits take. Most people are 'mixed types' for better or worse.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Being relatively non-authoritarian does not mean that such a personality is relatively unfree of the kinds of frustration and anxieties which reinforce authoritarianism. Typically the ways that such individuals learn to deal with such insecurities are fundamentally different from those coping mechanisms adopted by authoritarians. Yet it is possible that non-authoritarians are more flexible and adaptable to environmental transitions, creatively and constructively sublimating their sense of stress in ways which enhance adaptativeness and therefore are typically 'low stress' individuals.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Such individuals may function better in 'high stress' situations without the degree of regression, need for routinization or breakdown seen with authoritarians. From an ecological standpoint this would make non-authoritarians a more desirable personality orientation in the functional adaptation to environmental changes.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Genuine non-authoritarians are few and far in between in a world which is becoming increasingly stratified, stressed, bureaucratized and burdened by the problems of power. Authoritarian power structures which predominate in the world do not value highly or promote the kinds of traits exhibited by non-authoritarians. Adopting a non-authoritarian value orientation is often tantamount to self abnegation of power, status, identity, sociality or friendship in the world. It is to suffer a kind of social death in the world. On the other hand, the world is replete with authoritarians who are all trying to come out on top in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">EMPOWERMENT AND DEPOWERMENT</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The problem of difference and inequality in the world is seen as being a problem of powerlessness with the result that 'empowerment' has become the main ideological agenda of modern reform and social movements. It is usually not recognized that the problem of powerlessness is but a complementary part of the more pervasive and important problem of power in the world, with the result that efforts to create empowerment leads down the same road to ever greater divisiveness, difference and inequality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It also leads itself to hypocrisy as the movements which seek to 'empower' their people becomes entangled in the kind of power which subordinated and marginalized its people in the first place. They seek power for a select few as a special interest group.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The problem of power is its entangling process and its inherent corruption--social movements of the powerless in the face of power must be redirected toward the goal of 'depowerment'--the disinvestment of power in authoritarian structures and 'great organization' and its subsequent 'leveling' to a local level and decentralizing to an individual focus. Depowerment is the forsaking of the goal of 'dependent power'. It entails 'mobilization of the masses' in the sense of moving the great inertia of the collective and of tapping into the great reservoir of energy and ability of the powerless and bringing to realization the greatest potentials of their power.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">IDEOLOGY AND POWER</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Power centers world view. World view symbolizes and expresses power in the world. Ideology is the self fulfillment of power in the world. It is the making of power in the world according to world view. It is the logos which relationships of power and world view are founded. Ideology as a symbol system articulating power and expressing world view forms a mythology, a belief system of collective representation which centers reality by valorizing, naturalizing and consummating certain symbolisms with supernatural and super organic authority. Ideology transcends reality by attempting to step outside the natural influence of change.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">WORLD VIEW AND POWER</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">World view is a consequence and a cause of the psychology of power. The corrupting nature of power must be seen in terms of the psychological origins and consequences of world view. World view shares in the paradox of power, and world view is a manifestation of empowerment in the world. It simultaneously liberates us and limits our liberation by situating us. World view as the psychological expression of power in the world is inseparably linked to power and becomes inevitably associated with its corrupting tendencies.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Part of the psychology of power and the key characteristic of world view is its 'totalizing' sense of order--it fosters the illusion of comprehending the total order and final nature of human reality. This totalizing sense of order in the world, which is complete, does not require other justification, and leads to a sense of 'totalitarianism'--a totalizing world view which maintains complete control and refuses to recognize and as a consequence suppresses, all other possible world views. It is not too much to suggest that a totalitarian world view and a psychological of totalitarianism is strongly associated with a totalitarian world order. It is in this sense of totality that absolute evil is to be found.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">WORLD VIEW AND WORLD ORDER</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">People have long debated whether a certain world view leads to a kind of world order, or that world order will lead to a world view. It is enough to recognize that any kind of world order will be associated with a certain kind of predominant world view. Other perspectives may be available but the predominant world view will find the greatest degree of validation in the world, whether it is true or false, good or bad, healthy or diseased.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It remains to be asked that if our current world order is an evil empire, then what is the character of the world view that is most strongly associated with it, how can this world view be accounted for by relations in the world, and how can such a world view be used to rationalize and legitimate evil in the world, and also how is such a world view promoted or inculcated within the character of people which leads to the perpetuation of the dominant world order.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It may also be argued that there is not one single world order or a single predominant world view, but there are actually several which are competing or which dialectically cohere to form a dynamically self organizing world system. If this is so, then it makes no sense to speak of a single world view, but of several, and then it becomes necessary to outline the difference and interconnected between them and to demonstrate how they cohere to form a single dynamic world system.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It may also be the case that if and where evil genuinely exists, it is not an inherent part of such a system, but an inadvertent but inevitable outcome of its psycho-social dynamics, an unintended by product of its functioning and transmission. But evil is defined by its intentionality, or at least its intentional failure of responsibility. So the question of evil and world view requires a second, closer examination in order to better understand that if there is indeed evil in the world, then how does it become rationalized and how does it structure and become structured by the world evil.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It may also be the case that the world system being a self organizing and self regulating one composed of multiple orders and models, is in a sense a natural outcome of certain pre-dispositions, past orientations and future ward directions of development, of which no one is really in control or responsible for, and which would have like come into place whatever our intentions or irresponsibilities. If this is so then we may have no other choice than to tolerate and learn to live with its unintended evil consequences and to try to device means by which we can minimize its evil effects.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Whatever the case may really be, world view remains something important to be reckoned with, not just as a global perspective or general orientation, but as a model for belief and behavior, a predominant and pervasive attitude, inherent psychology and process of socialization and transmission. It is a paradigm of power. It also has certain implications of moral, ethical and existential efficacy which require examination.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is not too far fetched to understand how evil can organize itself on a global scale in the structure of multiple authoritarian power structures. And it is not too unbelievable to see how such a world organization of evil can be accomplished ideologically in the name of preventing evil through the security of world order--how it can promote a world view illusion of the efficacy and moral legitimacy of its own promotion of power and the use of force in the name of its peace, order, prosperity and protection of individual liberties and freedoms.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is little question that a world order can be established by an evil empire. The important question is whether or not alternative world order can be achieved without authoritarian power structures and if so, then how. Evil flourishes in the absence of moral order--it entails a corruption and perversion of morality for the purposes of power. If world order is achieved prematurely in a world which is morally unprepared then it must be an order of evil founded upon the efficacy of power and the bureaucratic bankruptcy of a common humanity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">THE POWER OF PEACE</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is time to learn to recognize and to cultivate within ourselves an alternative kind of power that does not depend upon the efficacy of violence. This is the power of peace that comes from patience, from the healing of time, and from the regenerative capacity of the earth and of our own human nature to forgive and forget. The power of peace lies within a state of powerlessness--forsaking the preoccupation and pursuits of power and seeking instead an independent form of power existing independently within our own unique personalities. We must learn the value of living peacefully with ourselves, with our neighbors, with our environments and with our earth. We must take care to pay heed to all the troubles within ourselves and outside of ourselves which cause us to seek to control the worlds, and we must learn to resolve these troubles in a peaceful way, by learning to live with them in an uncontrollable world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">THE PACIFIST PARADIGM</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The pacifist paradigm challenges all our paradigms of power and the power of paradigm with an alternative kind of 'unpower'. The paradox of the pacifist paradigm is that it is 'anti-paradigmatic' in the conventional sense of 'world view'. It is the dialectical counterpoint to or paradigmatic realities--of patterns, models and examples, yet outside of patterns, models and examples. It is meta-paradigmatic and thus transcends the problematics of paradigm through its synthesis of realities.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Its synthesis of realities comes from its keen sense and valuation of difference in the world, and the ability to transcend this difference through compromise and integration. It remains always one step ahead of the Difference of differences.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The power of the pacifist paradigm is the potentiality of people unfettered by the shackles of fear and blindness. It is the paramount paradigm of our children. It is the infinite question mark and the eternal answer.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER">PART IV</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">MIND AND MYTH</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></font></b></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A common mythical myth of the American Consciousness is that of the conflict between the frontier and civilization, between the rugged, independently spirited pioneer and the Eastern gentleman of an organized way of living. There are many permutations of this theme found in Cowboy and Indian movies, propaganda war movies and in home grown American legends of Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan and John Henry. This mythology underlies a lot of science fiction and science fact, in our exploration of outer space and our heroes of exploration, in the popularity of Star Trek and Star Wars. John Wayne was an embodiment and paragon of this mythical expression in the movies. Superman, Batman and other superhuman comic book heroes are also cut from the same mythical cloth, as are Mike Hammer, Dick Tracy, Matt Dillion and the all boy Cartwright family in the long running television series Bonanza. Mark Twain's grown boyhood adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer and A Yankee in King Arthur's Court.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The mythical meta theme of the American tradition of the folk hero informs the attitudes, collective unconscious and world view of American culture--or psycho geographical symbolisms, the way we look out onto and relate with a larger world and a total universe, as well as the way we understand ourselves and our own sense of society. It helps to frame our moral sense of duty in the world and the way we deal with conflict.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In a sense, the hypothesis of evil as being rooted in an authoritarian power structure which strives for world domination and the basic conflict with the interests and independence of the individual as the source of morality, is but another, rather academic variation of this same old theme. A theory based on observation, experience, science and philosophy has captured and reproduced a fundamental mythology which underlies its own creation. The interesting aspect of this is that anthropologically the theory itself as well as the empirical experience and information upon which it was based was cut from the same mythical cloth. It is meta-thematic in being both of myth and beyond and about myth. It is clearly an insider's point of view from the margins of the culture. The dilemma is posed is whether some other possible outsider's point of view might not be quite different or more objectively valid an interpretation or if an outsider's point of view world be possible or understandable from an insider's standpoint. Cultural anthropologists are routinely challenged by this basic dilemma during their long sojourns in other places where other traditions, mythologies, world views and civilizations predominate. They are marginal outsider's seeking a common ground with the insider's frame of reference.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is really no escaping this dilemma unless we posit somewhat arbitrarily and presumptuously a transcendent, objective, scientific frame of reference based on 'pure observation' of behavioral phenomena which claims in a 'hypothetico-deductive' and statistical fashion to stand outside of the purview of myth, normative consciousness, world view, history, that informs and composes the ground of the insider's point of view. In other words, the objective outsider's objective frame of reference is held to be the only scientifically legitimate one. The criticism against this 'unreflexive' attitude is that the outsider must have some general frame of reference for understanding human reality ad will actually superimpose his own implicit and transparent, unquestioned world view, values, mythology and sense of history upon the cultural realities of the people whom he 'studies'. True social scientists do not even have a problem, because they do not study people, but people as things, actions, events, numbers, words and as observational statements. The scientist then simply substitutes his/her own sense of pathos, ethos, nomos and mythos the vacant spaces between the lines of their recorded data--a scientific transformation of the realities of the people whom they've converted in to date bits, without a sense of critical absence, that something important about their lives is missing in the script.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is even claimed that science itself is bound within the cultural tradition in which it grew from and became paradigmatically formulated, and so is 'unconsciously' and implicitly rooted in the same myths, metaphors, values, moralities from which it originated.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is another way out of this dilemma, and that is to presuppose that there exists a universal ground of being human in which all mythology is rooted, and that the goal of the cross cultural researcher is the discovery of this common ground between cultures. Then it is the case that both the outsider's and the insider's frames of reference, mythologies, sense of history and values, are rooted in the same basic fabric of human consciousness and the goal of science is to elucidate this universality of being. In the case of our meta-theme about the American character, we might claim that this mythology is itself but one permutation of a larger, pan human mythology, and that its objective comprehension is an excoriation of its inner layers of consciousness. From a classical Oedipal standpoint we might say that it is the rebellion and struggle of the free spirited son against the law of the father. This is the basis of Freudian in interpretation of the human psyche. Jungians posit the presence of a 'collective unconscious' and of archetypal symbolisms. Chomskians posit a universal generative structure underlying all human language and Levi-Straussians have done the same for myth itself.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">All of these kinds of interpretations come out of a European philosophical/philological tradition of 'Culture History' and Platonic Rational Idealism which posits the a-priori existence of a Geist, a Spirit, a Noumena, a Cartesian Structure which underlies and predetermines human consciousness. It is interesting that the superman ideologies, the classical dichotomies between primitive and civilized, the Apollonian and Dionysian, and notions of cultural relativism and determinism all come from the same traditional source of Mind and Myth. It is also interesting that Marxist theory and post structuralist critique of such theory comes out of and is embedded in the same traditional fold.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To ardent empiricists embedded in a dialectically contraposed position of inductivism, such thinking is considered methodologically problematic from a standpoint of objective science. For positivists, the idea of a universal structure underlying language, thought, myth, and psychology is considered at best ultimately unamenable to scientific methods of falsification and validation and at worst, it is itself composed of the same ideological fabric of which it deals in its theory.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We are left back upon the same horns of mythological dilemmas with which this essay began. In resolving this dilemma there are several points worthy of close consideration. First, both themes of rationalism versus empiricism, of science versus mythology, in their many permutations, are but the contraposed extremes of a common dialectical continuum which itself exists for the purposes of dialectical elaboration and this dialectic has no final 'synthesis'. The only 'objective' standpoint then consists of stepping outside of the dialectic itself and of taking a neutral arbiter's position--both sides are right but neither side is completely so. To do so is to adopt a 'meta-dialectical' orientation. This is the only appropriate standpoint with which to objectively evaluate the terms of the dialectics. Secondly, if the notion of a common universality of human consciousness is correct, in which all our mythologies are embedded and from which all their permutations emanate, then we must reevaluate and redefine the role of science and its methodology in its study of human reality in such a way that scientific validity rests on some other common ground than empiricist or positivistic 'falsification'. This alternative framework demands a different philosophy of science and a different theory in science. Thirdly, the idea of a universal ground of human beingness is to be considered substantially self demonstrating in a similar way that its many permutations of mythology are to be considered naturally self organizing. They are 'self evident' truths and realities in our own human nature. We cannot step outside of its universal purview except by the adoption of a relatively non-dialectical position, and yet their validation of universality does not ultimately depend upon our stepping beyond its universality but in embracing its meaning as fully as humanly possible.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Finally it is the thesis of this work that this sense of universality if human 'beingness' is neither just linguistic, mythological, psychological or symbolic, but is a phenomena of the entire culture historical tradition of humankind which is rooted in the human capacity for 'sentience' of, about and in the world. It informs our mythology as a kind of dialectical conflict resolution through appositional analogical and metaphorical relations which are essential meta-logical and form our fundamental frames of reference/inference of the world by which we create meaning and come to question the unknown. It is the basis of both science and mythology, rationality and empirical experience. This is referred to as 'Mind' and Mind has both collective, universal components informing the universal ground of human beingness, and also unique individualistic components which relativizes and renders the understanding of mind partial, imperfect and an inherent dilemma of dialectic.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can never escape this universal condition of mind, or separate ourselves from its fabric of our existence in the world. We can only come to know it better by embracing it and reflecting upon our own and others experience of it.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Needless to say, this whole work, and the essays that follow, are intended for the elucidation of this basic human reality and of the implications which it has for our sense of mythology, morality, science, history, evolution, nature and phenomenological and conceptual human reality itself.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Evil exists in our world largely because we are actively engaged in acting out the mythological meta themes which compose our being and our world, of which evilness is but one possibility. The paradigm of evils is but one of many paradigms of our mythological consciousness. Pacifism as a meta paradigm is a paradigm of Mind, in the sense that Mind always comprehends and contextualizes the paradigms of Myth in our reality. Evil is a product of and model for myth. Peace is a condition of Mind--it is not just a possibility of the human world, as evil is, but it is the beginning and end of all human possibilities.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mindness is a pan human state and sense of Mind which is expressed both individually and collectively. The problem of Mindness is dialectically contraposed to the problem of world view--each problematic informs the other by its counterpoint. World view is always situated within and bound by and relativized because of a culture historical context and horizon of being--Mind situates the culture historical context and horizon of being about a particular world view in reference to the universality of human beingness. Mind is a pan human, universal phenomena. It is the expression of pan humanness in the world and it is also fundamentally an irreducible expression of the phenomena of the individual in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mind has long been an unfolding, self revealing process. Mind has been continuously 'evolving' with the evolution of humankind. It has been self organizing and its processual patterning has been unfolding as a natural expression of anti-chaos in a chaotic universe. It has had an ecological function and an evolutionary purpose which has made the critical difference between the development of human culture and traditional civilization and the biological evolution of humankind as a species. The development of Mind has been a gradual process of evincing human possibility--it has largely been non-progressive in its development, except in the sense that human possibilities have become progressively expressed and its patterning played out through mythological and ideological enactment.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mindness is the expression of the universal sentience and the toti-potency of humankind as a kind of partial omniscience, a toti-potency which has overreached its practical and philosophical limits in its present state of Earthboundness. Earthboundness is a paradigm of Mind, which carries us to the edge of natural entropy and chaos. It is precisely upon the verge of Earthboundness that we are able to reflect back and to comprehend the horizons of Mindness, as before now it was theoretically without limit and therefore remained incomprehensible and intractable to definition. In environmental exhaustion humankind has biologically and culturally reached the limits of its patterned possibilities which allows us to circumscribe what it means to 'become' human in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mindness was not a priori to the possibility of humankind--it did not preexist waiting to be discovered and elaborated by humankind. It sprung into being with the emergence of humankind--as its expression of the latent possibilities of human sentience and human being. It exists because we exist--we do not exist because it existed before us, except perhaps as a pure possibility of the physical universe. Mind does not frame our experience in the way that world view can be said to--Mind happens to us and through us, experience the world with us and for us. It un-frames and re-frames our frames of world view, as an expression of our possibilities of being. Mind realizes s as we realize Mind, as an expression of our total potentiality of being and becoming.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mythology is the pan human expression of mind in the world. It is not mind itself but the process of its actual patterning in the world. Mythology is the ground of human consciousness, Mind is the collective unconscious. Mythology is the way Mind mediates reality for us. It is the expression of its adaptive function in nature in relation to environments.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mythology is the only way that we can come to know Mind in ourselves, and in one another. Mythology is composed of the collective representations which cohere to create Mindness and Minding in our reality. Mythology gives us a handle on our minds and on Mind as a universal.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mythology is always expressed metaphorically, analogically, relationally and dialectically. It frames our experiences, our phenomenology, our 'senseness', our references, our inferences about our environments. It contextualizes Mind for us in reality and contextualizes reality for us in Mind. The function of mythology is the mediation between Mind and Reality--it is characteristically human means of human sentience for resolving conflicts between our experiences and our environments. Mythology is the way that Mind comes to know the environment and the way our own evolution of possibility has come to know its environments.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mythology is a mosaic of permutations and possible patternings of Human Beingness and Mindness in reality. Mythology is the ground of meaning and being for humankind. Mythology is the paradigmatic patterning of Mind. Ideologies and world views are but characteristic kinds of mythologies, configured from the universal ground of Mythos. They are mythologies 'in the making', in the process of being acted out or performed within particular spatial temporal contexts or 'epochs' or culture historical horizons of human experience. Ideology and world view represent the realization, actualization and empowerment of mythology. Ideology and world view are mythologies as 'self fulfilling prophecies' which makes the culture historical patterning of Mind seem recurrent, repetitive and pre-determined.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the enactments of power in the world, we cannot escape our mythological imperative in the fulfillment of our possibilities of becoming. Our mythologies, their many permutations and reinterpretations are our destiny in the world. Not even science is beyond its purview of pre-determination, as the technological teleology of science has come to epitomize the expression of our power in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The recurrent themes of our mythology are in a sense meta-thematic' in the sense that they converge upon a single set of dichotomous sets of 'meta-relations' held to govern other relations in the world. The meta-themes of life versus death, sea versus mountain, male versus female, parent versus child, civilized versus primitive, culture versus nature, become reflected in philosophical and even scientific meta-themes of mind versus body, natural versus supernatural, physical versus meta-physical, time versus space, ends versus means, etc. The structure of mythology has been well elucidated. Meta-themes govern sets of relations in the real world and they can be reinterpreted into other kinds of meta-relations. The value of such a structure is in its flexibility and in its contextuality--it always surrounds and explains things in terms of other things.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Science would say that this makes mythology tautological and unfalsifiable and this is correct. It is to be asked but never answered whether such a convergence of meta-themes is reflective of archetypal dualisms which are determined by the structure of the human mind, or whether they are merely a thematic convergence of taxonomies and categories of experience which is situated within a common existential set of predicaments faced by all humans. The former hypothesis is indeed amenable to scientific method. The latter alternative is at least amenable to verification of its context of elucidation, the investigation of its existential experiences in which such meta-themes find expression in the real world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We cannot ultimately determine whether there are universal dichotomies in the human mind or if so, then what exactly these might be. But we can determine the recurrent kinds of existential relationships and common experiences in which these meta-themes are situated and expressed in reference to the world, and this is why the latter explanation is the more scientifically unproblematic.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The meta-themes of mythology lend themselves to poetic expression--the roots of poetic consciousness are grounded in these mythological meta-themes and mythology is dependent upon poetry for its effect and relevance in human reality. It is in the understanding of the aesthetic function of poetry as the origination and creation of human possibilities of experience, that poetry can be said to be the voice of Mind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The meta-thematic elements of mythology are a reflection of the 'meta-logic' inherent to Mind. The 'meta-logic' of Mind comprehends several alternative meanings, yet all cohere to make Mind 'meta-paradigmatic' and account for the special, unique significance of human sentience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The meta-logic of Mind consists of a 'meta-paradigm' of the following sort:-</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">a) Metalogue or metalogical dialogue between self and other constitutes dialectical question and answer conversation about a problematic topic such that the 'structure of the conversation as a whole is also relevant to the same subject. A metalogue comprehends more than one subject simultaneously, in meta-thematic terms.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">b) Meta-logic is defined by Webster's Dictionary as the 'metaphysics of logic' and as '1. Beyond the scope of logic; not determinable by logic. 2. Relating to the metaphysics of logic.' Meta-logic is both about logic and simultaneously beyond the purview of logic.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">c) Meta-logos is about words and yet beyond words or the metaphysics of words. Logic is rooted in language and all language is metaphorical in meaning. The two value logic is a reflection of the meta-thematic unity of mythology. 'Logos' or word, was for the Greek philosophers the 'rational relations of things to one another or the general sense of order or measure'. It '…designated the principle through which the cosmos is generated, ordered, united and maintained, or even the ordered, united, evolving cosmos itself…Logos is therefore the common principle making possible 'understanding between man and the world and also between men.' (Kleinkrecth, 1967:page 81)</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">d) Our awareness of our commons state of being is an extension of our self awareness. Our self awareness and environmental consciousness, our Mind, is structures by the apperceptive and simultaneous awareness of our own being in the world and the being of others in the world. Meta-logic carries the connotation of implication of 'apperception' defined as '1. Perception; 2. Consciousness by the mind of its own consciousness; self reflective perception applied to metaphysical ends--"Apperception is the essential mental act in the great stages of mental generalization, perception, conception and judgment--Baldwin." 3. The reinterpretation of new ideas by past experience.'</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">e) Meta-logicalness also carries the connotation of 'reflexiveness' which is of and about and yet beyond simple self reflection--it is the ability to make the strange seem familiar and simultaneously make the familiar seem strange. It fuses difference in the world such that we may find identity in difference. We find ourselves in others and others in ourselves and our mythologies become but variations of common meta-themes in other's mythologies and vice versa.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Sentience is found in our human capacity for establishing a meta-loge with the universe. This is the source of our human possibilities for becoming that are not constrained by nature or the physical reality of our presence in the world. Our meta-loge is the expression of the meta-logic of Mind that creates and comprehends paradox, antinomies, dilemmas, enigmas and questions in reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is important that we frame out problematics of Mind in metalogically in terms of meta-logue--it is important that we find in our meta-logues about Mind the basis for both our poetry and our science.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the understanding of Mind as the possibilities of human sentience, it is necessary to recognize the existential and phenomenological isomorphism between 'being' and 'meaning' such that the two are but opposite sides of the same coin. We must come to terms with the reflexive meaning of meaning and 'beingness' of being in our metalogical meta-loges of Mind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To 'define' comes from Latin 'definere' (to limit, from "finis", a boundary) and is defined as 'to determine or describe the limits of, the nature of, to set down the precise outlines of, to describe exactly, to state or explain the meaning of meanings of a word, etc., to give the distinctive properties or characteristic of a thing, to constitute the definition of, or to settle or decide. (obs.) Synonyms include 'to bound, demarcate. delimit, determine, limit and fix.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Several connotations are evident in this 'definition of definition'. Definition is a response to the general question of 'what?' as in 'What is a thing?' or 'What is human reality?'. Answers to 'what' questions tend to be precise, clear and finite. It is a kind of answer tending to 'determine' what the meaning of a word is, in sharp outline or contrast to other words and meanings. It involves putting a clear, sharper outline of what a vague thing is.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Determining a boundary, demarcating a finite limit or a sharp outline by the definition of a thing or word constitutes an enactment of meaning in itself. Thinking up our definitions to 'what is' questions involves literally and figuratively the very meaning of that reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Furthermore, we come to define a thing in terms of other things that are related or compared or contrasted with it within a broader relational context of understanding. This is the metaphorical and basic mythological aspect of our definition of meaning in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our 'definition of definition' calls up the metalogical meta-logue about this problematic topic. Definition of meaning and the meaning of definition as being a metalogical meta-logue brings us to a 'mise en abyme' of meaning as constituting the essential 'paradoxicality' of Mind. Without our paradigms we would not be able to distinguish the nothingness which lies beyond it--'there can be no glimpse of the abyss, no vertigo of the underlying nothingness.' (Miller) But our paradigms both opens up the chasm of possibility, and simultaneously fills it up with meaning and covers it over by giving it a name--grounding the groundless. Our paradigms then automatically become 'trivial mechanisms' or 'artifices' f our production. 'It becomes something merely made, confected, therefore all too human and rational…' (Miller)</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In speaking meta-logically of 'sense of order' or 'structure' or 'system' or 'paradigm' do we really mean something different from 'sense' itself as 'sense/nonsense' or 'meaning/ameaning' or are we merely 'tying knots in our handkerchief' as Gregory Bateson puts it, 'such that these terms will forever stand not as fences hiding the unknown from future investigators, but rather as signposts which read: "UNEXPLORED BEYOND THIS POINT". Our language can clarify as well as obfuscate.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Meaningful information consists of drawing a 'slash mark' between subject and object, known and unknown, something and nothing:</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Meaning may be regarded as an approximate synonym of pattern, redundancy, information and 'restraint' within a paradigm of the following sort:</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Any aggregate of events or objects (e.g. a sequence of phonemes, a painting or a frog or a culture) shall be said to contain 'redundancy' or 'pattern' if the aggregate can be divided in any way by a 'slash mark' such that an observer perceiving only what is on one side of the slash mark can 'guess' with better than random success, what is on the other side of the slash mark. We may say that what is on one side of the slash contains 'information' or has 'meaning' about what is on the other side…'(Bateson 1972: pages 130-2)</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our definitional 'What's' delimits a boundary, an outline circumscribing a thing through the dichotomizing between what is and all else it is not, by inscribing a 'slash mark' between the unknown and the known by names and words which precipitate meaning and bounds a definite 'region of information' implicit contraposed to what lies beyond or outside of the definition.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The act of definition creates an order, a paradigm, of meaning, a semantics constituted by the interrelationships of meanings of words arranged in a particular syntactic sequence. Definition also excludes by implicit negation all that meaning is not. What is bounded by the word order is rendered explicit and concise and coherent, what is left unsaid and undefined, lying beyond the definitional boundaries, is left implicit only, unknown, unclear and chaotic. The question mark of the definitional question 'what' is a kind of slash mark emphasizing the definitional boundary between reference/inference. Precipitated meaning in the region of information constitutes referential knowledge gained definitionally--pointing to information beyond the slash mark consists of inferential information gained hypothetically.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Denotation is the explicit definition of a word as opposed to its implicit connotation. It is derived from the Latin 'denotare' or 'to mark out' and is defined as 'a marking out or off, the direct explicit meaning or reference of a word…an indication or sign.' Connotation is the implicit meaning of a word left undefined but associated with the definition. It comes from the Latin 'com' or 'together' and 'notare' or 'to mark, note' and is defined as an 'idea suggested by or associated with a word, phrase, etc. in addition to its explicit meaning…in logic, the sum of all the attributes thought of as essential to the meaning of a term. To 'connote' is to suggest, convey, to imply or involve.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Denotation and connotation stand in mutual relationship with one another, the former being the literal, explicit, marked off boundary and the latter being the figurative, implied relationships of the term to a larger contextual framework of meaning. There can be no complete definition without both strict demarcation and loose relationship.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must understand the interdependency of semanticity and the structure of syntax in language as the dialectically contraposed components of sentience, understanding and information which is the communication of understanding. Syntax constrains the possibilities of Mind by the superimposition of a paradigm--without syntax Mind cannot be brought to full realization. Semanticity fill the syntactic structure with meaning--reinforcing it both referentially from within and inferentially from without. Syntax consists of the functions or rules of relation, all the kinds of slash marks of meaning. It is to be asked but remain unanswered whether there is a 'deep' syntactic structure of the human mind which is universal but precise in its determination of possibility. It is also to be wondered whether such a deep syntactic structure is always evolving with the evolving and possibilities and evincing patterning of human mind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But such questions distinguish too greatly the difference between semantics and syntax--we must see that all syntax is contextually relational in its demonstration and all semanticity is syntactically constrained in order to be rendered meaningful and relevant. To look for a 'deep paradigm' of universal structure of the mind is necessarily to become 'meta-paradigmatic' to discover what is before and beyond structure, as the unfolding, patterning possibilities of Mind. All paradigms are environmentally relational and constraining--all structures have a subject-object context which is determined by patterning of Mind in which it is embedded--it is the result of a dialectical interplay between human conventionality and natural process. It is being continuously recreated, reconfigured into new patterns--it simultaneously creates meaning and nonsense in order and chaos.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The definition of definition suggests the 'meaning of meaning' as an important metalogical relationship. Meaning is defined as 'that which exists in the mind, view or contemplation as a settled aim or purpose; that which is meant or intended to be done; intent; purpose; aim; object or that which is intended to be, or in fact is, conveyed, denoted, signified or understood by acts or language; the sense, signification or import of words, or as sense, understanding, knowledge.' What emerges from this definition of meaning is the purposiveness of sense and the sense or significance of purpose as expressed through words or acts or the 'enactment of definition'. The centrality of the meaning of 'purpose' or the 'sense of purpose' or the purpose of meaning or sense, which is simultaneously connoted and denoted in definition of 'something from nothing' or 'sense from nonsense' conveys the idea of the 'meaning of meaning' as being the meaningful purpose of life in human reality as itself the meaning of purpose. The essential purpose of being is meaning, and the purpose of meaning is being. Purpose in this sense, becomes defined as 'aim, intention, design, resolution, determination or as an 'instance, example' or paradigm. Paradigm creates purpose and purpose creates paradigm.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This is the ultimate paradoxicality of human being and Mind, the inescapable tautology of the meaning of human being and the being of human meaning. When we refer to the meaning of meaning in human reality, we are referring to the paradoxical mise en abyme that meaning is both the means and end of living, the sense and purpose of being.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Indeed, meaning inheres intrinsically and inextricably in the fact and enactment of human existence--meaning is being--and the 'quest' for meaning constitutes the 'purpose' of human existence. The quest for happiness, for fulfillment, for wealth, for prestige, for truth, for eternity, or immortality or for El Dorado or the fountain of youth or for paradise or freedom or just a little bit of social security and a modicum of simple material amenities, is what it means to be human and the purpose of existence is the quest for ever greater meaning of human reality. Meaning is like a golden thread coursing through all the weave of existence composing the fabric of many bits and pieces of the grand tapestry of reality--meaning underlies all of the greatest and deepest and most important reasons and purposes and truths of life.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It follows that meaning, being and purpose become defined through their creation, pursuit and fulfillment in terms which are the enactment of paradigm and pattern in the world and are expression of forms of human empowerment. Mythology and its poetic voice is the human vehicle for this empowerment.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The meaning of meaning and the definition of definition emphasize clearly the fundamental paradoxicality and the mise en abyme of the metalogic of Mind. It illustrates the essential, irreducible 'reflexiveness' of human sentience. Ultimately the structures of human reality and the experience of interrelatedness in the world are expressed through the 'reflexivity of meaning and being'. Reflexiveness is the principle structure of human meaning and being in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Reflexive is defined as 'reflex, reflective, or as expressing an action turned back upon the subject; designating a verb whose subject and direct object are identical…'. Akin to reflexiveness is 'reflectiveness or the state of being reflective, taking cognizance of the operations of the mind, capable of exercising thought or judgment…exercising thought, meditative'. Reflection expresses among other things, 'the fixing of the mind on some subject; serious thought; contemplation or the result of such thought; an idea or conclusion, especially if expressed in words.' (Webster's Dictionary, 1983)</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Reflexiveness emphasized grammatical connotations, connotations of reflexiveness and reflection and the apperception of 'the conscious of mind of its own consciousness' or 'self reflective perception applied to metaphysical ends'. Inescapably human reality is universal, relative, symbolic and metaphorical and also has an inherently reflexive structure through symbols and metaphors. Human reality always evinces a quality of 'turning back upon itself' and of 'being self aware or conscious of itself'. It is a condition of self consciousness as this becomes reflected in contextual relation. Reflexiveness then is the ground of being in human reality--the ultimate meaning of this reality. But it is an ever receding ground in its inherent recursiveness and 'reduplicative' character. It is the well spring of infinite imagination and the abyss of infinite regress. It is the mise en abyme and the bottomless bottom of human potentiality and the possibility of Mind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The reduplicative character of reflexiveness implies both a 'regenerative' nature of meaning, a processual patterning expressed through metaphorical symbolism and a fundamentally of paradox in that this regenerative quality contains both the potential for infinite regress and for infinite development of meaning. Reflexiveness defines the structure of meaning in reality and of human interrelatedness in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Though reflexivity takes on different shades of meaning in various disciplines and contexts, a core is detectable. Reflexive as we use it, describes the capacity of any system of signification to turn back upon itself, to make itself its own object by referring to itself; subject and object fuse. A long tradition exists in which thought has been distinguished from unconsidered experience, where life is not merely lived naively without being pondered but regarded with detachment, creating an awareness that finally separates the one who lives from his history, society, from other people. Within the self, detachment occurs between self and experience, self and other, witness and actor, hero and hero's story. We become at once both subject and object. Reflexive knowledge then contains not only messages, but also information as to how it came into being, the process by which it was obtained. It demonstrates the human capacity to generate second order symbols or meta-levels--significations about signification. The withdrawal from the world, a bending back toward thought process itself, is necessary for what we consider a fully reflexive mode of thought. To paraphrase Babock (1980), in order to know itself, to constitute itself, as an object for itself, the self must be absent from itself: it must be a sign. Once this operation of consciousness has been made, consciousness itself is altered; a person or society thinks about itself differently merely by seeing itself in this light. (Ruby, A Crack in the Mirror, 1982, page 3)</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The metalogical reflexiveness of the definition of definition and the meaning of meaning constitutes the essential ground of being in human reality--it is the mythological mirror of Mind and situated in the world. It constitutes our knowing and our knowledge about ourselves and our world. Knowing implies apperception of our own consciousness, of our own awakened knowledge, as a state of self awareness. To know comes from the Sanskrit root jna', to know, and is defined as 'to perceive with certainty; to understand clearly; to be sure of or well informed about, or to recognize by recollection, remembrance, representation or description, or to distinguish.' Knowing implies information, shrewdness, worldly wiseness. Knowledge is defined as 'clear and certain perception…the act, fact or state of knowing, understanding, learning, all that has been grasped by the mind…cognizance or recognition, information, the body of facts accumulated by mankind; acquaintance with facts; ranges of awareness or understanding.'</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From vagueness to clear 'knowing' knowledge denotes the definition of meaning in a certain paradigmatic pattern, a 'knowable' sense of purpose. It implies 'information'. Information comes from the Latin meaning 'an outline, sketch' or 'to give form to, to represent, to inform'. All information is definitely patterned with a fixed order of purpose. All formation is paradigmatic. The meaning of information implies definite knowledge which becomes communicated between self and other, 'objectified' by acknowledgment, recognized by others by being presented in a recognizable, knowable form. It also implies meaning which is contained within a certain definitional boundary--subsumed within a region of Mindscape.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Reflexive information fixes and paradigmatizes our own identity, meaning and being in the world. Knowing ourselves is a way of determining ourselves in the world, and determining ourselves becomes a manner of knowing ourselves.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Furthermore, information also implies communication or significant interrelationship between people, as that which is communicated.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It makes sense to refer to the reflexive 'knowledge of information' and the 'information of knowledge' as the basis of human communication and transmission. We might also refer to the information of communication and the communication of information as the principle paradigmatic of 'knowing' our world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The essence and raison d'être of communication is the creation of redundancy, meaning, pattern, predictability, information and /or the reduction of the random by 'restraint'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is I believe, of primary importance to have a conceptual system which will force us to see the 'message' (e.g. the art object) as both itself internally patterned and itself a part of a larger patterned universe--the culture or some part of it.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">…Still more important, we like to test and verify the correctness of our view of our relationship to others. (Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972, page 132)</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Defining or meanings involves us in a process of 'figure ground' relationship between 'internal, intensive, explicit, defined meanings' and the 'external, extensive, implicit, connotative, figurative, metaphorical meanings of the larger contextual framework'. The figure ground relationship between subject/object and the background 'connoted by the outline of meaning' is the basis of metaphorical meaning, boundary identification, the metalogical mise en abyme of the paradoxicalness of meaning, and also provides the sense of 'parallax of meaning' which orients, configures and provides perspective in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The figure ground relationship constitutes the structure of antinomal meaning and being in human reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We intentionally, purposefully 'configure' our reality. It must be recognized that how we define the outline of this interrelationship, how we draw the slash mark and outline of meaning and being, is first and foremost dependent upon an arbitrary act of will. 'Identification with a difference' is configured by what we decide we want to make it mean, and by all that becomes unintentionally implied by our definition. Our definition circumscribes the meaning we choose, and chooses the context which then circumscribes our meaning.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The only constraints to our enactment of definition are those superimposed by7 the need for communication of limited information--the need for maximization of 'relatedness' in the world. These constraints are the pre-existing paradigms of convention, culture and history. Mind works through us independently as the expression of its possibility and also works outside of us as the paradigmatic patterning of its possibility.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">'Figure' comes from the Latin 'to form or shape' and means the form, shape or outline of something, a pattern, design, a picture, a likeness, representation, or a 'being of the imagination, a conception of the fancy; a phantasm; an image.' To configure is to 'form; to dispose in a certain form, figure, shape.' We configure our realities by making our paradigms. We configure the form, appearance, shape outline, in relation to a 'ground' which is the bottom, topic, area of reference, valid reason, motive, cause, logical basis of conclusion, that on which anything may stand, rest, foundation, basis or the 'figure of which a figure is represented' in relation to a context of constraining relations in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Reflexive meaning is the ground of being in human reality. It is the essence of what we come to know of ourselves and our world. It is also an extremely relative affair--differently interpreted by different people in different contexts. There is no fixed measure or elemental atom of meaning, there is no fixed context or universal frame of reference for meaning--no life force, or pleasure principle or eros which permutates into the many variations of a common theme. Meaning expresses a theme of relativistic understanding of human reality, a universal theme of human comprehension of which there are infinite permutations. In its reflexive regenerativity meaning becomes also dynamic and changing.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Human beings are actively or passively engaged in making their own meaning systems in a continuous process of relating significantly with their contexts, of communicating themselves with the world. Human beings are engaged in continually refashioning their meaning systems to preserve and maintain a sense of existential coherence and continuity of self identity in the world. We seek paradigmatic unity of meaning and being, of Mind in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Human beings who fail in this process of meaning creation inexorably suffer meaning in loss--psychological anomie--and loss of self identity--alienation--in the world. They become unreflexive and disintegrative.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In its reduplicativeness, reflexive meaning is also of an irreducible, universal and paradoxical nature. It is inherently paradoxical and therefore always problematic in the dual possibility of possible creation and infinite regression--the dialectically anti-thetical possibilities of progress and regress, construction and destruction, integration and disintegration inherent in meaning.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The paradoxicalness inherent in meaning arises from the forever momentary 'indeterminacy' or possibility--the relative uncertainty of meaningful change. This is a source of chronic anxiety about existence, an expectant anticipation of chance, the fear of the unknown and unknowable, from which we all seek escape through paradigms but from which there is ultimately no escape. This pervasive, pan human condition gives rise to a quality of 'liminality' of simultaneously being nothing and something, and of 'antinomality' the background condition of our existence, the texture of our knowledge, the irreducible relativity and uncertainty of our meaning and being, an unresolvable sort of internal psychic conflict 'generated by a proposition that suggests its contradictory (or the domain of its contraries) as strongly as its own affirmation and the moment of its affirmation.'</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There are more than one level of the super organic functioning of the re-synthesism of Mind. This is not the same imputation of super organic reality to cultural phenomena or to social life per se, as it is conventionally interpreted in anthropology, but that the mind and by extension the intersubjectivity of Mind, has a subjective life of its own separate from, but not completely independent from experiential human reality. This subjective life of the mind constitutes an objective reality of it own apart from the phenomenological experience or understanding of human reality. This super organic 'life of the mind' or 'experiential reality of the mind' or 'mentality' is irreducible and unamenable to analysis.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Symbolization as the dialectical process of symbolism has different 'modes of representation' which come to organize experience in a seemingly 'categorical' or configurational, paradigmatic way. These modes of representation are based upon different sign systems organized around certain implicit and explicit ideational rules of relation. Alphabets and syllabaries are two such modes of representation, as are ink drawing and clay modeling. Modes of representation organize and lead to the classification of varieties of experience--differentiating in a systematic way many relationships. Modes of representation subsume one another and lead to the hierarchicalization or relations and the taxonomic classification of things.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Different 'modes of representation' allow experience to be 'experienced' in different ways--to become expressed through different symbol systems and to become reconfigured into different paradigms of being. Different modes of representation lead to different 'casts of Mind'--the identity of experience is molded and pre-formed in characteristic ways which have distinct cognitive, emotive and conatie consequences.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mind comes from the Anglo-Saxon 'gemynd' meaning 'memory'. Basic to the notion of mind has been the importance of past experience as the empirical, subjective, phenomenological ground of mental construction and the functioning of Mind as the integration of 'stored experience' which enables mediation of present environments. Matter comes from the Latin 'materia'--the 'stuff of which anything is composed'. This is an interesting contrast, as 'dreams are the stuff' and all mind is composed of the same essential human stuff--subjective experience--whether it is rationally or empirically derived or objectified.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mind and matter is a fundamental dialectic mediated by human experience. Mind can be expressed as the 'temporalization' of experience and matter can be thought of as the 'spatialization' of experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The structure of experience determines that there should always be a degree of symbolic isomorphism between Mind and Matter--the structure of each is reflected by and represented with the structure of the other. We experience mind and matter, and mind and matter are experienced by us.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The synthetic unity of human experience provides us with a sense of reality which defines our beingness through the articulation of symbolisms within our environments. It is this identity of experience which provides s with unity of Mind--the common human sentience of thought, feeling and pattern which is referred to as the 'psychic unity of humankind'. The synthetic, symbolic structure of Mind, expressed as the identity of experience is the basis of the principle of the psychic unity of humankind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We purposefully seek to maintain within our everyday streams of experience a sense of identity and the unity of Mind. The importance of this 'need' of human sentience,, both perceptive, conative, emotive, cognitive and normative, must not be underestimated as it becomes the organizing principle of culture historical development.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the dialectic of identity, between beingness and non-being, selfness and otherness, there occurs a cybernetic interrelationship between Mind as the reflexive identity of self beingness and Culture as the other identity of non-being. The cybernetic relationship between Mind and Culture in the dialectical process of identification is more than analogical--the symbology of Mind being analogous to the symbolisms of Culture. The cybernetics of Mind and Culture are homological--they have structural affinity and the same ontology of development and are derived from the same origin. Furthermore, Mind and Culture constitute in their patterning of interrelations a single, cybernetically integrated system.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is the cybernetic homology of Mind and Culture which allow us to speak symbolically of a Culture in terms of an individual personality or identity of being, and to refer to individual identity in reference to a particular individual's contextuality within a particular culture historical framework.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">That this interrelationship constitutes a single integrated cybernetic system, one which is dialectical and symbolic, is important. There are many feedback mechanisms between culture and self which need to be comprehended. This dialectical system constitutes a developmental series of cyclical alterations which revolve around a single directional axis of development--of change and transformation of both individual and culture. This central axis is the 'center' of culture and character.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is a cybernetic system of relations between the identity of Mind, the communication function of language, and the phenomena of Culture as patterned context. In a large part Culture is the physical expression and projection of the defense mechanisms which protect and reinforce the identity of Mind--culture constitutes the symbolic 'archosis' and collusion of tradition which provides a contextual framework by which identity of Mind becomes referenced and is rendered significant.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Language is the mediator of this set of relations--it is the medium of expression and articulation of its symbolism. It makes no sense to analytically separate Mind, Language and Culture in the on going stream of human conscious experience, but to speak of a single integrity of its experience as 'Mind/Language/Culture'. It is better to see these three sets of phenomena as but differential facets of the same basic operational system of human relationship in the world. It is possible to see Mind in terms of Language and Culture, and Language in terms of Mind and Culture, and Culture in terms of Language and Mind--there are symbolic resonances of each in terms of the other.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mind is the super organic collective consciousness of humankind which is seated in the consciousness of the individual--individual's are the vehicles of Mind. Culture's are the contexts of the collective unconscious of people, and Culture-History is the context of the collective unconscious of humankind. Individual's are the separate 'ideas' of Mind--the holothetic symbolic expression and embodiment of Mind. Mind experiences reality through the experiences of people. The unique identity of each individual occurs as the one possible 'ideational instance' of Mind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mind as an 'idea' expressed individually is the product of the symbolic dialectic between beingness and non-being. As 'idea' it ultimately informs the individual's 'Reason for Being' in the world. Existential engagement of 'idea' as a deliberate decision requires the transcendence of the dialectic by the reaffirmation of 'self identity' in the world vis-à-vis the other identity as possible 'non-being'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">World view as the integration of 'mind/language/culture' informing the principle of presence and the centeredness of being, is in a sense the dialectical antithesis of Mind. World view occurs as a consequence of the functional integration of cybernetic systems of 'mind/language/culture' in terms of symbolic conglomerations. World view becomes the professional's perspective--Mind remains the amateur's naiveté' about the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">World view is always an 'intensive' orientation, while Mind is always an 'extensive' orientation. World view becomes the symbolic cultural identity of 'otherness'--the embodiment of the 'idea' of non-beingness. World view does not transcend the dialectic of identity, but unfolds within the mythological parameters and paradigmatic patterning of its counterpoint. The individual does not 'embrace' world view--world view embraces the individual and entails lack of or control over choice. Mind is 'epi-genetic', the germ plasm of Mind. World view is culture historically relative--a particular symbolic Geist predominating (as Centeredness of Being) within a particular context of place and period--Mind is transcendental and pan human in process, beyond the spatio-temporal boundaries and culture historical horizons of world view.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">So far, science has been mostly a phenomena of world view and not of Mind. Only when it embraces Mind fully will it transcend its own limitations of paradigm and power.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The super organic integrity of Mind is always and only expressible in terms of dialectical identity of the individual. This is the holothetic principle--the integrity and 'structure' of the whole is expressed in terms of holism of its individual parts, in terms of dialectical textuality of individual identity. Mind becomes the 'thetic' starting point for the identity of the self, and the identity of the self becomes the synthesis of the identity of Mind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It follows that any method based upon the holothetic principle attempts to understand Mind as this is manifest in terms of any given individual's basic identity in life, and attempts to infer from such studies an autobiography or life history the nature of Mind as a super organic transpersonal phenomena.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The dialectic of individual identity is a counterpoint between self and other identity in the world. It is the self sidedness of this dialectic which confers the holothetic structure of Mind. The other sidedness situates and orients the self within a culture historical context, providing the relational significances of the individual sense of being, but it is the unique self identity which the individual brings into the formulation of mind which confers upon it a vitality and a real world relevance, without which individuality as an 'idea of mind' would remain unexpressible or incoherent. The super organism of Mind, then, is not expressed in terms of an individual sacrificing him/herself for the sake of a larger corporate social identity--though this may be one facet of the 'self' expression of Mind. Rather, it becomes expressed in terms of how and why an individual incorporates Mind as Self, as the organizing Reason for Being in life. It is in this self centeredness of the holothetic principle that the source of the momentousness tends toward a super critical unpredictability which may decisively redirect culture historical momentum.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is the holothetic principle which confers a sense of wholeness to the self and to Mind as an 'idea' of human consciousness. The integrity of the self derives from the integrity of the Mind, and the integrity of the Mind is centered in the relative integrity of the self. There is thus a certain reflexiveness of identity between sense of Self and Mind which is the essence of the holothetic principle.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This is the part of the grand paradox of human existence--the sense of self and sense of Mind are separate and yet the same--both are an 'idea'. This paradox becomes even more problematic when this reflexiveness of identity is sees as expressed in terms of a dialectic between self and other--sense of self becomes defined in terms of the other-identity and vice versa, an individual identity is the self centered/other decentering dialectic of Mind. Other-identity intermediates the holothetic principle as the grand 'anti-thesis' of Mind. World view is situated in the other-identity of non-being.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Individual dual identity forms a dialectic of consciousness and context, character and culture, of contraposed values, interests, significances and choices which are always expressed and defined in terms of one another. This dialectical of identity constitutes the mythological fabric of culture historical consciousness written in the meta-language of Mind. The concepts of individual identity arises as the synthesis of this dialectic of Mind and Myth--it is the culture historically symbolic idea of Mind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The individual, as the basic culture bearing unit of culture history, becomes as well the basic 'genetic unit' of Mind--i.e. an 'idea' as the basic constituent unit of Mind. It is the self side of the dialectic which serves to situate Mind as an idea with a corporeal materiality and with a uniqueness of purpose and integrity of being. It is the other-side of the dialectic which situates Mind within a culture historical provenience and which loads its 'ideas' with relative and universal symbolic significance.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The universal Mind of humankind is but the collective unity of all individual human minds--the individual human mind becomes an 'idea' of the collective Mind. As individuals pass away, they 'vanish' as ideas of Mind, but Mind as a corporate collectivity of ideas, continues through beingness of others. The meta-language of Mind is the sharing and communication of consciousness between individual ideas--the universality of this meta-language is rooted in the potential universality of this sharing of Mind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Self-identity and other-identity are but two sides of a single coin of consciousness--the coin of individuality as the idea of Mind, and the exchange of such equivalency of coinage is the universal economy of Mind. Individuals, as basic ideas of Mind are the principle irreducible mediums of exchange of Mind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What is self becomes expressed in terms of 'otherness' and vice versa, so it makes little net difference in the dialectic which side one begins or ends with. Whichever side is manifest, the other shadow side is always implicit and predictable.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Though individual 'ideas' may come and go, Mind as a collective entity continues as a corporate 'identity'--founded as it is in the possibility of patterning and necessity of communication--culture historical transmission of Mind. Mind as a 'collectivity' has than a 'super organic' structure and a meta-linguistic function above and beyond that of its constituent individual 'ideas'--it comes to have its own reasons for being beyond those 'reasons' if its basic ideas.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mindness is always expressed symbolically and metaphorically as 'something which stands for something else'. It is the metaphorical structure of human meaning which accounts for its inherent paradoxicalness and 'antinomality'--Mind must always be expressed as 'referring to something else'. Knowing Mind is always indirect. World view substitutes Mindness for Mind--the metaphorical structure of meaning becomes denied as 'something which stands for itself'. Metaphor both opens human meaning to possibility and simultaneously prevents the realization of possibility--world view closes off possibility through its realization. Mindness always functions metaphorically in the symbolic mediation of human reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The 'ecology' of Mind is the measure of the inter-relatedness of reality--everything is related to everything else, however indirectly. This ecology is reflected in the Ecology of Mindness as the measure of relatedness of human awareness and understanding to the empirical ground of human reality--to the environments of Mind. It is expressed as an intrinsic ecological consciousness of the environmental physicality of Mind. The ecology of mind came into being gradually as a functional 'system' of interrelations which have some form of adaptive mutuality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The ecology of mind is total in an all pervasive sense--it always surrounds, contextualizes and relativizes meaning in the naturally chaotic and entropic environment.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">MINDSPACE AND MINDSCAPE</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mind occupies its own kind of space. This space is metaphysical mostly, but it does have extension and parallels in physical reality. The spatial metaphor is a necessary way of imaging and looking at Mind, because it provides a sense of its synchronicity and simultaneously of its ideas and their meta relations that would otherwise be difficult to 'see' in a glance. Mindspace is infinitely internal and internally infinite in its dimensionalities, just as physical space is infinitely extensive. Within its infinitude of intenseness there is vast room for infinite possibilities of patterning. We cannot easily transverse mindspace, just as we cannot easily transverse even a minuscule region of physical space, because we are bound by our biological being within such narrow time frames of existence. As old as we become we always die too young and move to slow to cross even a section of its area, or to fulfill even a portion of its potentialities. And yet even from our limited vantage point, if we study its breadths we can formulate pretty good ideas of the kinds of things which compose it and the relations between those things.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mindspace is 'holistic' in the sense that its multi-dimensionalities cross cut every tradition bound academic boundary discipline, field of study and domain of imagination that there is available today and comprehend and unit the mountains of information into networks of understanding that we have yet been blind to. The depths of mindspace easily encapsulates the whole compendium and corpus of human knowledge and wisdom.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mind also has a kind of topography, a kind of terrain, a kind of geography that is distinctive. We speak of regions of mind, of no man's land, of mountains and of paths and forests between the mountains, of horizons, benchmarks, stratigraphy, foundations. We see that in a particular region of mind, in a particular paradigm of its patterning, things and ideas are set in relatively fixed and stable relations to one another, while other things and ideas are in fluid and dynamic relations, flowing around and between the fixed coordinates. We can speak of meridians and of relative distances of relations between things, and see that some forests are more thickly wooded that others, some mountains higher and some pathways more winding.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Spatial metaphors are important in our understanding of Mind because it provides us with a means of translating our temporal experience of Mind into a static sense of space, in which temporal frames of time become spatial measures of distance. Space and time in Mindness are not strictly separate--the experience of one becomes the experience of the other in different terms. Our normal experience of Mind is as phenomenological streams of consciousness which flow in time and across space. Even our perceptions of time and space can change and become altered in interchangeable ways, in a kind of synaesthesia of the fabric of Mind. Space and time metaphors are also the first and last 'scientific' anchors that keep Mindspace on the physical ground of reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mind in time, as dynamic pattern and change, is fundamentally different than Mind in space as fixed structure and synchronic happening and movement and each has very different kinds of consequences in our paradigms and understanding of human reality. Temporal metaphors of Mind allow us to talk about some things such as change, development and process, which spatial metaphors of Mind do not allow--on the other hand spatial metaphors allow us to see and examine 'structure', periodicity and fixed pattern and context in ways temporal metaphors disallow.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mind moves through a space time continuum. Mind always moves and movement is the key characteristic of its understanding. Its movement through space and time over the terrain of its mindscapes, animates Mind as a force, an event, a continuing happening of consciousness. Its movement, however constrained or however entropic never ceases. It may slow or speed up but it never stops.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">MENTAL MAPS AND MAZEWAYS</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Given the efficacy of the movement of Mind, of its space time metaphors and of its Mindscapes and Mindspace, we must see that mythological paradigms of Mind create mental mazeways of walls, corridors, corners, doorways, windows, mirrors and thresholds which we must learn to navigate successfully within and which lead in many different directions but always indirectly.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In our daily streams of consciousness, we learn and develop mental maps of where, when and how to navigate our mazeways in a manner that becomes meaningful to ourselves. These mental maps of our Mindspace are simple and small at first, but we gradually add onto them and they grow in complexity and sophistication along the way. These maps record symbolic markers which indicate a basic change in direction, a shift in mode, a slowing or speeding up of movement. They are flow charts which indicate the consequences of alternative directions and all the crossings along the way.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our maps and the navigation of the mazes are rooted in our memories and in our alternative states of conscious, phenomenological experience. Much of our memory is state dependent and is triggered by key symbolic markers in our environments. We seek a sense of continuity and an experiential identity of consciousness within our ever changing environmental contexts.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">META-PHYSICS</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is important to understand the possible relations between Mindspace and physical space. It is important to understand how our understanding of Mindscapes, however narrow and limited, becomes superimposed upon our 'normal' perception and experience of the physical world in which we live, such that it is always distorting and 'bending' the light of the things we see and experience through the prisms of its 'glassy essence'. Our perception of space and time are normally 'hyperbolic' and curved upon the peripheries of our conscious focus, there is distortion of parallax of our perspective and we lose sense of proper proportion as if looking up at objects from the bottom of the sea. Mind filters our experiences and always mediates our relations with the world in ways we are rarely self conscious of. The finished version of the 'normal world' that we get through our sense is always from a 'Mind's Eye' viewpoint and rarely are we able to know the difference. But we can always be assured that however sensitive, however sensible, or however scientific, it always must be in some measure be 'relativized' and disproportionately distorted by our small idea of Mind. Even the understanding of ourselves and of our own being in the world, must be mediated by our Mind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Only by embracing and understanding better the movement and workings of Mind, of the interconnections of mind and matter and the possible functions of human experience, can we hope to gain a clearer vision of both Mind and the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If the Mind filters the world through our experience of it, then we must also ask if the world of physical reality does not also in some important and hidden ways also help to 'pre-structure' or influence our Mind, or at least our understanding of Mind. We only discover the working of Mind through the reflexive elaboration of our own mythologies, and our mythologies always are derived from symbolisms rooted in natural environments and are always framed within relational contexts which are grounded in our experiential realties. It is to be wondered whether our narrow versions of Mind are somehow constrained and 'prejudiced' by the experience of our paradigms and mythological patterns in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If so, it follows that better and broader understanding of the Mind can be fond in gazing into grains of sand as well as mediating upon mountain tops. Learning how to see reality more clearly, more phenomenologically unconditioned, more naturally, and how to relate to our environments in ways which decrease the ecological distance between our own being and the experience of its nature, will not also help us to better embrace Mind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">MIND</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Whereas world view is a totality of a fixed center, Mind is the decentered totality of the universe of human experience and reality--it has no center, no boundaries, no ends, and yet its expression can be found reflected in anything and everything. Its sense of wholeness can be represented symbolically in bounded and finite entities. It is never complete and always open to other possibilities. Mind is the human awareness and its manifestation in human sensibilities and beingness. The possibility of Mindness gives us a partial hold on reality by relating us to reality. The history of human consciousness has been one of the developmental unfolding of the possibilities of Mindness as a reflection of being in reality. World views have arisen, changed their positions of power, and disappeared in continuous succession, but only Mind has emerged and blossomed as a continuously characteristic of human possibility.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mind exists as a universal possibility or as a possible universality, but it is always a restricted and limited human possibility. As structure, it is an a priori possibility, but as human understanding it remains always and only an a posteriori epi-phenomenon of human experience. It is not an immanent Geist or Spirit as an organizing force or ultimate Logos of reality as some eidetic, metaphysical and noumenal super reality. The physical phenomena of the universe are ordered upon patterns which can be represented by certain scientific principles or general law, but the human understanding of these ordering patterns and principles is always preconditioned by the limitations of human experience. There can be no perfect, proven, absolute isomorphism between the 'structure' of human reality and our knowledge of that 'structure' and all we are left with in the final analysis are or own sets of partial and imperfect ideas about the reality of Mind--our own limited sense of Mind (or Mindness) which serves as the basis for our scientific understanding and excoriation of real phenomena.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We exist because Mind exists and Mind exists because we exist--it makes no difference to ask which comes first or which cause the other. Both exist as manifestations of its possibility. We are the result of its eventual working out of its possibilities and our Mindness becomes its expression in reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our happiness, sense of well being, understanding, adaptive adjustment and mental health and sense of reality all depend upon our Mindness or 'state of Mind'--'a minding of our business'. Mindness is not necessarily achieved through embracing world view but through the dispelling of the illusion and delusion of power. Mindness is achieved in dialectical transcendence to world view as its antithetical opposite. Mind is attained through the cultivation of a sense of being, of beingness in the world in the fullest of human senses.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We cannot ever know or envision Mind directly--it is always construed indirectly, mediated by the mechanisms of experience. Its paradox is that if seen directly it is ultimately chaotic in appearance--chaotic because of its entropic complexity. Or mechanisms of experience superimpose a sense of order and meaning to this chaos, but at a price of superficiality and spuriousness. No sooner do we bound chaos to create order than Mind slips outside of our boundaries to exist in the unknown chaos beyond our field of view.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The dialectics of Mind are evolutionary--they are continuously being transformed in response to the adaptive pressures of a greater environmental context which is also always changing. The evolution of Mind as a characteristically species wide human phenomena allows us to speak of the 'psychic unity of humankind' and to posit a 'universal structure' underlying human language. It has been a 'by product' of natural evolution and it arose as an 'adaptive mechanism' of human survival. The function of Mind as a natural system has been in human adaptation to evolving, complex natural environments and later, social environments. The evolution of Mind as the evolution of life on earth, as been largely a chance phenomena as an expression of patterned possibility--there has been nothing preordained or immanent or inevitable about evolution, not is it necessarily 'progressive' in the sense of fulfillment of higher purpose. It arises as a 'system maintaining' function--a consequence of maintaining an ecological, dynamic equilibrium of relations. This evolution is based upon an 'anti-entropic' and anti-chaotic principle of increasing order and complexity in the dialectic with natural entropy and the tendency towards random disorder. Life is fundamentally 'anti-entropic' and 'anti-chaotic' in a broad evolutionary sense in that it strives to perpetuate and increase meaning systems, organize relations, in the face of environmental change and chaos. Mind is in an evolutionary sense epi-phenomenal--it does not drive evolutionary development but is merely the resulting patterning by which such evolutionary development then becomes constrained. It is a second order feedback mechanism of evolution. Mind must be construed as the organizational patterning of natural systems, and as the human possibility for comprehending this patterning. This human capacity for Mindness is what most characterizes and distinguishes the human species.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">FREEDOM OF MIND</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The confrontation of new environments demands a different kind of courage, the courage to exercise rigorously the freedom of the Mind. Like any other kind of freedom it must always be fought for, as like any other kind of freedom it is being subverted or denied by all those people who feel threatened by it. And there is reason for their fears, for someone is probably profiting by them. Freedom of mind demand freedom of voice--to speak our loudly and to demand to be listened to. The enemies of Mind can easily be recognized as they are either trying to ignore you or to silence you. The reign of Silence, like the reign of Terror is the antidote to the social disease of 'too much freedom'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Often times it seems that what is written is not as important as how it is presented. A rich person and a poor person may both be able to write, and even if the poor person is a better or more interesting writer, it is the rich person who is still more likely to get published and read. There are different kinds of voice and different forms of silence, and varying degrees of freedom.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Similarly, a professor and a pupil may share the same set of ideas, and even if the professor conveniently 'borrows' them from the student, it will probably be the professor's voice that will carry the weight of credibility and be listened to instead of the words of the student.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This is a sad testimony on our sense of progressive enlightenment, a lesson to be learned about the alienation and spuriousness of social relations in our modern environments.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our exchange of ideas is still not very free and open. Minds do not regularly meet upon an equal footing. Worlds and the information they contain are still systematically controlled and suppressed. Access to information has become privileged within a rigid, class bound status hierarchy. Voices of opposition challenging the status quo of who knows what with bold new ideas are either strangled into social death, or the bright words merely fall upon deaf ears or else echo hollowly down long empty corridors.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Now we need to remind ourselves and publicly reaffirm our ultimate freedom of the human mind. Its continued freedom is the best guarantee we have for our progressive emancipation. The final control over our minds and our voices always depends upon our own courage and will power to resist programmatic brainwashing and behavior modification, to relativize ideological propaganda, to resist subtle and subliminal techniques of persuasion, to reach through the impersonal screens of political, economic and social prejudice and violence, to refuse to remain silent or to allow ourselves to become silenced under authority and power, and to reject the status quo of class bound consciousness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This we must do at any price as the quality and outcome of our collective confrontation with our new environments depends greatly upon it.</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER">PART V</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">BEINGNESS AND NON-BEING</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></font></b></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We look out upon the world and we are a part of it and yet we are also separate from it. The side of us that finds itself in the world is our sense o being in the world, or our beingness. The side that remains separate is our sense of non-being in the world. The former seeks identity in the world, the latter finds the difference of identity in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is our beingness and our non-being in relation to the world that creates the dialectical tension in ourselves, a struggle between sides as to which shall at any one moment have control over our sense of identity. The state of being in the world is the creation of a fusion of differences such that though differences exist in the world they are transcended by common identity--they are rendered unimportant. Non-being in the world leads to a differentiation of identity from the world, such that differences become the basis of relationship and prevent their fusion, and self identity also become sundered between what remains in the world and what becomes alien from it.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We frequently switch between states of being and non-being in our world, depending upon circumstances. Insecurity or uncertain situations cause separation in order to protect our sense of identity from possible harm. In order to maintain this sense of separation we erect certain kinds of barriers, or 'ego defense mechanisms' which block or intermediate the flow of information or communication, between our inner selves and our outer world. It is behind such bulwarks that we can foster a sense of 'ego identity' that is supported by such defenses and which is essentially separate from the experience of the world and yet remains surrounded by and situated within the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Supplanted within the self, constructed of symbolisms and rationalizations by which we mediate experience of the world, we come to depend on our sense of ego as separate from the world and we invest energy into maintaining of props and supports which will help to preserve and promote it. Though spurious to our sense of being in the world, our ego's become important to us as if they were a genuine part of our own self identity--as something necessary and unexpendable in our lives.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">And our sense of ego identity becomes like transparent bubble or a pair of tinted sun glasses which always distort our perception of the world and always bends the light of our vision. We grow accustomed to this sense of ego distortion, so accustomed we no longer notice the difference and come to think and act as if our mediated experiences were genuine and unadulterated instead of filtered and distorted. Our whole sense of perspective of reality, as it is mediated through our ego identity becomes different from the actual dimensions of experience, but we soon can no longer tell the difference, and we response to our distortions and representations of the world rather than to the world itself.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Our sense of ego identity becomes invisible to ourselves--we behave as if it were natural and true. But if it is so transparent and invisible to anyone else in the world--our ego identity become our see through clothes without which we would feel naked and probably quite ugly in the world. We wear them as if they were the outer layers of our skin, which cannot be shed except under the most personal of circumstances.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Other people who are wearing similar raiment over their identity fail to find genuine relationship with one another, but in their common alienation from natural experience they find a sense of communitas in which their different distortions of reality cancel one another out in interesting and sometimes complementary ways, and they find mutual satisfaction in the sharing of common fears, insecurities and defense.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To these people, those who walk with naked egos in the world are threatening, foolish, embarrassing and shaming of their own imputed morals. They become objects of derision, fear displacement and secret fascination. To those who walk nakedly or with very thin skins of ego adornment, those who wear the clothes of kings, sun glasses and live in little bubbles seem empty, hollow, false, ingenue, spurious, afraid and fundamentally distorted or slanted. Though those inside of bubbles seem translucent from without, their clothes are neither invisible nor distorted--directing perhaps but never distorted.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The differences between beingness in the world and non-being in the world are the basis of a fundamental schism of human reality and between people in the world--it is a schism of mentality, experience, world views and ways of relating in the world. It is not a difference between introversion or extroversion, or between hyper-suggestible and hyper-resistant, between aggressive and regressive, or between projective and introjective, though all of these may be a component part of a common polythetic complex of basic differences.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">People who do not live in bubbles or who only walk in thin skins experience their worlds with only slight distortion and are not insulated from the harsh light of the sun or the cold of the night. They learn to live with direct, unmediated experience, without the need for props and supports to sustain their sense of identity in the world. Their identity is experience and experience is their identity, and there is little need for inflated ego in an essentially ego-less world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The state of being in the world is one in which identity gained through relationship with the world, through unmediated experience of the world. Identity is essentially un-Academic, to the extent that acquired, formal knowledge structures experience in the way that ego identity structures it. The sense of self remains strong,, because it survives the vicissitudes if the world unprotected and un-insulated from its harsher, more threatening realities. It can be called the 'school of hard knocks' but it is more of a natural attitude of openness to the environment that becomes augmented by acquired skills in dealing with and adapting to changes in the environment. Knowledge, however abstract or concrete, can either help or hinder this adaptive functioning, but is in itself neutral in regard to how it is deployed by and individual.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">While it might be said that the sense of being in the world is one of adapting to and negotiating with the environment, its resources, limitations and alterations, non-being in the world is primarily involved with coping with and controlling the environment or of maintaining sense of ego in relation to the environment.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Beingness in the world and non-being entail two different strategies of adaptation to the environment, strategies which have different sets of consequences for both individual character and the social environment in which the individual is situated.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Non-being in the world works within environments according to pre-arranged designs or paradigms--attempting to superimpose structure upon the environment and to alter and render the environment conformable to this design. The design itself usually comes from the pre-conditioning of some previous environment in which the self became well adapted. It is the individuals attempt to maintain a consistency of environmental relations from this previous adaptive orientation in the ever emerging present. There is a dependency of the individual upon an internalized fixedness of pattern which is projected upon the environment in orderly ways. The sense of non-being, and the insecurity which underlies it, results from the degree of 'misfit' between the projection of the internalized sense of design and the actual order or environmental patterning encountered. This misfit results in 'cognitive dissonance' which forces upon the individual a decision of either to amend the internalized sense of order or else to attempt to amend or rearrange the environment. Attempts to do the latter lead to a need to establish 'control' or power in the environment and results in greater frustration and greater cognitive dissonance.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Another way of understanding this is to see that peoples prearranged plans and preconditioned paradigms set up in the individual certain standards of normality of expectation in relation to the environment--it is when changes which happen lead to a sense of 'relative deprivation' either actual or anticipated, that an acute sense of environmentally situated stress occurs which requires resolution through remedial action. The frustration producing attempt to maintain one's pre-designs at all costs leads to the formation of ego defense mechanisms and coping mechanisms which allows one to channel and deal with the stress that inevitably, continuously results. The ego perseverates in a high state of tension which comes to infuse all experience with supernormal significance and larger than life importance.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Non-being is brought in to the present as an unchanging sense of past, of past sense of order and paradigm in the world which is uncompromising and 'absolute' in its existential coordinates.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Non-being can in a sense be referred to as a regressive state of being in the world--one which falls backwards into a nonexistent sense of the past by failing to move forward with an ongoing sense of the present.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Non-being leads to a 'set piece' planning strategy which renders responses to the environment typical and therefore predictable. The range of possible moves or alternative patterns of adaptation are laid out well in advance, as a set of rules, guidelines, instructions the form of which exists representationally in the environment. This kind of strategy attempts to account for and manage all possible kinds of change in the environment, frequently by attempting through control mechanisms to reduce the range of these possibilities.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Beingness encounters the environment in a more flexible ad hoc and spontaneous manner which relies upon intuition and ad lib extemporaneous responses to meet and cope with environmental challenges and changes. The success of such and 'encounter' strategy depends upon the organismic and functional flexibility of the individual. It entails a foregoing of previous designs, sets of expectations and standards of normality. It entails an 'unlearning' of past patterns of adaptation such that their experiential elements remain, but without a necessary fixed pre-pattern or pre-arrangement which needs to be preserved. The ego identity is able to manage disorder even to thrive on chaos, at a minimum threshold of stress.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Such an orientation entails an open-mindedness to the ongoing, ever present environment. Experience is taken at face value, fully and as a matter of fact. Sense of identity depends upon maintaining a sense of environmental relation, of being able to change appropriately and in a timely manner with fluctuations in the environment. Control over the environment is not sought so much as control over the self in changing environments. The locus of control is introjected into the self rather than projected out of the self. Loss of control results not from failure to maintain ones internalized sense of pattern in the external environment, but in the feelings of things getting out of control in failing to adapt to the environment.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There may be extreme types but no 'true' types of only non-being or beingness, but there are many mixed types of people who are more or less one way and the other.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Non-being can be said to correlate with patterns of authoritarianism, while beingness corresponds with creativity. These types of complement one another and can be thought of as negatively correlated such that where there is a predominance of non-being and authoritarianism there will be a corresponding lack of beingness and creativity, and vice versa.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The two types can be said to elicit two different varieties of experience of the world. For non-being the experience of the world is 'fear mediated' and one's responses are 'fear motivated'. Environmental changes are experienced as threatening to the established sense of order. There is a regressive sense of always lagging behind and of needing to keep up. There is a sense of deficiency which is rooted in the environment, the lack or need to make the environment better or perfect, more complete and finished. Stability of the environment, continuity of perceptual pattern from past to present, the congruence of experiences with previous expectations, are valued and are preferentially perceived. Deviations, anomalies, discontinuities are devalued and selectively filtered from experience or simply ignored. There is in the experience of non-being a pervasive feeling of basic, inexorable uncertainty and anxiety which is construed in the environment of the world, feelings which require secondary compensation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">For non-being, the world is experienced in a basically vicarious way, as something distant, indirect, alien, full of illusion and as separate from the self. The world is constituted by difference in a non-relative way such that any and all differences make the difference.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">For beingness, the experience of environments is fundamentally challenging and stimulating. Change and difference are not repressed or devalued but are prized as 'interesting' and exciting or at least diverting. Identity is gained by experiential involvement with environments rather than through a fundamental sense of separation. Sense of self is experienced as incomplete in relation to the environment, demanding self fulfillment, actualization and expression. There is a feeling of being supported or uplifted by the environment. Diversity, anomaly and difference are values as the source of intrigue and expectation while continuity, similarity and sameness are seen as uninteresting and unchallenging.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">For beingness in the world, the experience of environments is always immediate, direct, irreversible and different. Many differences exist but none make the difference.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is possible that non-being in the world is related to the psychological phenomena of field dependency--of depending upon fixed frames of reference by which to orient ones perspective of reality and experiences of the environment.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Non-being is an inherently simplifying approach to human reality. It favors over diversity, conformity over deviance, simplicity to complexity. It is an approach which always seeks to interpret the world in simplified and simplifying paradigms.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Beingness is always complicating human reality--preferring diversity, difference and deviation over the opposed values. Complexity--in both the environments of the world and in the experience of these environments is preferred.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Non-being is a specializing and focusing approach to human reality. It seeks a single set of repertories and of patterns on which to model the world. It is a matter of become finely tuned to certain specific environments, of becoming exceptionally well adapted in narrow frames of reference and in environments with relative overall stability.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Beingness is a generalizing approach to many different environments. It is a jack of all trades but master of none. It is a broad based behavioral flexibility which readily transfers and moderates skills and experience from one environmental context to others. Beingness tends to approach the world in a generalizing and generalistic way.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Non-being is relatively restricted yet highly elaborated to many variables upon a single common theme. Beingness is relatively unrestricted yet unelaborated to a few variations upon many different themes.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Part of the paradox of beingness and non-being is that both ways of experiencing reality lead to two different sets of long term consequences for adaptation and depending upon environments, one kind of adaptation is more suitable for some circumstances while the other is more suitable to other contraposed circumstances.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Non-being in the world fits best when the world has overall stability and is highly compartmentalized into many different niches. Specialization in narrow niches congers on non-being adaptive success over the generalization of beingness. It facilitates long term fixed focus and the exclusion of peripheral distractions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Beingness works best in rapidly changing environments which are destructive of daily routines and 'sense of structure'--it fosters general but non-specific adaptation to a wide range of environmental niches and works best under the stress of change.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Beingness and non-being are centrally tied to the psycho-geography of human experience and relationship with environments. People seek to maintain an experiential 'identity' of perceptions in the flow of events from one environmental context to the next. Rapid changes, death and separation tend to overload and break down the individual's capacity for dealing with change, leading to maladaptive relations between self identity and its environmental context. In psycho-geography, there is clearly no separating the external, environmental identity of the self and the internal psychological identity of the environmental context. Unconscious becomes rooted in context, and context becomes rooted in the unconscious.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The principle kinds of environments in which beingness and non-being find reinforcement are in social environments of interpersonal and self-other or individual-group or group-group relations, and natural environments of the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Social environments which are characterized as 'in group' oriented and 'intensive' are reinforcing of non-being. Rank Order Hierarchy and Status Role identity are nomothetic social contexts which foster and are fostered by non-being--the self as compared to significant reference others, or as constituted by the psychologically internalized relations of the social environment. Such environments foster a sense of security and social stability based upon a traditional conservatism and conformism to a given, narrow range of values or a focused group orientation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Long term existence in relatively slow changing natural environments also fosters a sense of non-being of identity. Cultures which are fixed, sui generis and relatively secluded and immobile also lead to a cultural orientation based upon the elaboration of non-being--superstition, prohibition, animism, ritualization of sacred and secular life.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Social environments which are 'out group' oriented and 'extensive' as 'outside of any center of power' are reinforcing of beingness as a strategy of adaptation to randomly fluctuating social environments. Sojourners crossing cultural boundaries and regularly having to 'make the strange familiar' must cultivate a sense of being in the world in order to avoid the otherwise inexorable and debilitating culture shock. Strangers and marginal types are also more generalistically unfocused and are characterized by their beingness in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The poet, the artist, the sleuth--whoever sharpens our perception, tends to be anti-social; rarely well adjusted, he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are. This need to interface, to confront environments with a certain anti-social power, is manifest in the famous story, "The Emperor's New Clothes". 'Well adjusted courtiers, having vested interests saw the Emperor as beautifully appointed. The anti-social brat, unaccustomed to the old environment clearly saw that the Emperor 'ain't got nothing on'. The new environment was clearly visible to him. (Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message, 1967)</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It follows that beingness comes from the confrontation of diverse ranges of natural environments or regions of great environmental diversity, and that displaced cultures or diffused cultural orientations that have witnessed or suffered a great deal of mobility and transition should be more promotive of beingness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Certain aspects of beingness of the new generation are in conflict with the sense of non-being of the older generation--nonconformity to certain traditional values, creation of new cultural environments and orientations, general lack of social responsibility that goes unlearned except by negative reinforcement and punishment. It also follows that certain aspects of the non-being of the new generation are in conflict with the beingness of the older generation--roller coasters versus strolls in the parks, daydreams versus disillusionment, self centered pride versus hard won humility.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">As we grow older, we tend to trade off our sense of being and non-being in the world for another sense of non-being and being in the world, and this becomes the basis of the perennial conflict between the generations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is a fundamental difference between the professional specialist who is well adapted to a fixed environmental context, highly elaborated set of behavioral repertories and the 'amateur generalist' who is never afraid of trying out new lines and is usually pretty good but rarely superlative. Amateurs often offer a sense of freshness which stuffy, tried and true professionals usually lack. Amateurs sometimes invent or discover things too obvious but quite apparent to professionals.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Professionals come to know and exhaust the many different profiles of a single occupational or adaptive horizon--their inventory of experiences focus upon the complete range of variations of a common line or theme of activity or involvement. The amateur shotguns experience over many profiles of several different horizons and the experiences gained in each add to a general repertory which may be applied to still others.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is another paradox between beingness and non-being in adaptation to environments. The structure of ego identity of non-being seems strong and impervious to change, yet it is founded upon spurious foundations which can suffer sudden, complete breakdowns or go through its own 'conversion' experiences when its mediating function finally becomes undone by environmental changes. The high level of environmental stresses confers upon non-being a kind of hyper-suggestibility and susceptibility to environmental or social influences which seems counter intuitive to its show of changeless imperviousness. The stolid character of ego identity can appear quite hypocritically strong and enduring like a rock and yet be actually quite manipulable by subtle influences which are threatening and fear inducing. Unmasked, the essential selflessness of such egos become the hapless and helpless bodies of mass oriented, mindless crowd behavior. They become the soulless entranced spectators of tragic accidents. As much as these people attempt to control their environments, they are also controlled by their environments. Their relationship with the environment is characterized by psychological interdependency such that the relative status of the ego, its sense of expectation or deprivation, is critically influenced by changes in the environment.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is this paradox which confers upon these people a kind of 'change of wardrobe' chameleoness which allows them to change ego identities when environmental constraints makes it convenient for them to do so. They exchange their fixedness of being and purpose for a 'fitness' of new internalized environments.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Beingness on the other hand, seems to have on the surface an apparent flexibility, a capacity for its skin to change colors with the changing seasons of its environment,, but underneath its chameleoness it remains the same chameleon. It fosters an integrity of being which continues through adaptation and fitting into new environments--this integrity of self identity crosses many boundaries of environmental variation and change without breakdown or undergoing a metamorphosis of being. This is a basic paradox of being, for it is ever changing and yet always the same basic identity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The importance of understanding the distinction between Beingness and non-being extends beyond the characteriological and experiential differences and have are of greater consequences in accounting for fundamental social differences and general phenomena of humankind's adaptation to their world. It has come to influence our sciences and our modern world views.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Culture history can be said to be in part of study of human beingness and relative non-being as it becomes manifest in the world. As such culture history opens us up to qualitative and substantial varieties of human experience and general phenomena which are mostly unavailable to more scientific approaches to the study of human reality. It allows us to frame answers for certain kinds of questions and problems of human reality which are otherwise unanswerable or difficult to contextualize.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">One critical difference is between the study of the human being as 'an object of knowledge' and the learning about human experiential realities as a 'subject of understanding'. The former, statistical approach defines human being as non-being, in terms of countable objects or components, in terms of numbers and things. This approach reifies human beingness and transforms human identity into 'thingness' that is 'objectified' by becoming 'de-subjectified'. The second approach deals with human beingness in subject terms of phenomenological experience and resists the reification and numerical transmutation of the irreducibly qualitative and holistic in its original state. The second approach transforms human beingness into 'metaphor' for which to understand a human's interrelations with the environment. Being transformed into a name or a 'word' has other consequences for human identity, whether it is nominal or verbal, or literary or oral, but the looseness of interpretation and connotation preserves a sense of the generality and contextuality which inheres naturally in human experience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Erich Fromm makes a distinction between authoritarian conscience, which he describes as the 'superego' of the internalized law of the father, and later, of society and the 'humanistic conscience' which is not internalized authority but an inner 'voice that calls us back to ourselves'--'the human core common to all men, that is, certain basic characteristics which cannot be violated or negated without serious consequences'. This humanistic conscience is rooted in the traditions of religious philosophy. He goes on to assert that the central moral problematic of modern humankind is the reification of human identity. 'Man is not a thing, and if you try to transform him into a thing, you damage him.' Power reifies human beingness into non-being, turning a human being into a corpse.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">…A corpse is a thing. Man is not. Ultimate power--the power to destroy--is exactly the ultimate power of transforming life into a thing. Man cannot be taken apart and put together again; a thing can be. A thing is predictable; Man is not. A thing cannot create, Man can. A thing has no self. Man has. Man has the capacity to say the most peculiar and difficult word in our language, the world 'I'…</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">…to understand our neighbor and ourselves--is to understand a human being who is not a thing. And the process of this understanding cannot be accomplished by the same method in which knowledge in the natural sciences can be accomplished. The knowledge of man is possible only in the process of relating ourselves to him…Ultimate knowledge cannot be expressed in thought or words…And you can never exhaust the description of a personality, of a human being, in his full individuality; but you can know him in an act of empathy, in an act of full experience, in an act of love…</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">What, then, are the ethical demands of our day? First of all to overcome this 'thingness'…to overcome our indifference, or alienation from others, from nature and from ourselves. Second, to arrive again at a new sense of 'I-ness', of self, of an experience 'I am' rather than succumb to the automaton feeling in which we have the illusion that 'I think that I think' when actually I do not think at all but am rather like someone who puts on a record and thinks he plays the music of the record.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">'Medicine and the Ethical Problems of Modern Man' Erich Fromm, The Dogma of Christ--and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology and Culture.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This difference of beingness and non-being is related to the fundamental schism between the 'two cultures' of Academia, the Sciences and the Humanities and the critique of the 'anal obsessive' Weltaangshaung of science as being unable to deal impersonally with the personal and its comparison with more humanizing traditions rooted in religious philosophy, has been noted by such people as Abraham Maslow who makes a distinction between the nomothetic, deficiency motivated knowledge of science based upon the control of uncertainty in the environment and idiographic, love inspired knowledge which seeks involvement with the environment.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Subject-object relations in the world are directly related to differences in self- other relations in our social worlds. Consideration of 'self-other' relations in the world involves Martin Buber's critical distinction between 'I-thou relation' and 'I-it relation'. In the life of dialogue we can choose to either meet face to face what challenges us in our environments and refer to it as 'you' or else we can stand apart from 'it' and view it as an object. Each of these different attitudes involves a different sense of self, or I, one being characterized by beingness and 'I-it' being characterized by non-being. The self of beingness is involved in an exclusive and unique relationship, unlike any other. The self of non-being is one that 'experiences, assesses, compares, sums up, analyzes and learns'. No preconceptions, anticipations, desires or purposes interfere between I and you--such a relationship is only possible when such pre-dispositions have been vanquished. 'I-thou' always involves reciprocity. From relation it sometimes leads to 'encounter'--'the high peak of relational life, the lightening flash which suddenly illuminates the way'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">As for what is precisely meant by encounter: whereas relation is the unilateral recognition of a vis-à-vis as you on the part of an I, encounter is what happens when two I's step into relation simultaneously. Encounter is the coming together into existential communion of two I's and two you's. encounter is a privilege that I receive. I enter into your-relation of my own accord and thereby fulfill the 'act of my being, my being's act' but encounter is not done by me. 'You encounter me by grace; it is not found by seeking…You encounters me. But I enter into immediate relation with it…'</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">You-relation …is the very 'cradle of real life'. And what is 'real life?' All real life is encounter. Is life unreal then? …History shows that it is out of I-you and I-you encounter that the truly creative, redemptive and revelatory acts draw their being. It is both from the mighty encounters and from the little encounters between I and you that new creations, new redemptions and new revelations spring…(Martin Buber by Pamela Vermes)</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This understanding of the difference between beingness and non-being in self-other relations recognizes the primary importance of 'encounter' as a state of 'reflexiveness' or 'reflexivity' in relationship that comes from the doubling of mirrors dissolving boundaries in reality, opening out onto endless possibility and becoming 'identity with a difference'. Furthermore, the connection between the reflexivity of encounter in self-other relationships and creativity is recognized. The possibility of encounter of the self with the world is the wellspring of human creation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The inherent reflexiveness of self-other relations entails that we find ourselves in others, as reflections or representations of the self, and that we find others in ourselves, as their reflection and representation. This leads to consideration of the inherently interpersonal horizon of the self identity and other identity--a self-other meta-relation--such that neither self component not other component is complete when separate or alone from the meta-relation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The interpersonal horizon of the self and the other is composed of 'bundles of things'--traits, experiences, memories, skills, feelings, etc. Both self and other identity is defined polythetically rather than monothetically. I or thou are not just a single organismic entity, a name with a complete personality attached. Both of us are a composite of many different things. Furthermore, the things within us are integrated by sets of interrelations between these things. We are composites of a range of variation of different images, but are found in reflection and representation in reflexive 'inter-identity' between self and other</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">When self and other enter into interrelationship, there is an 'unpacking' of things and their interrelations and things are shared, compared and contrasted between self and other. Common things and their relations are the common ground for mutual identity--differences between things become the basis for the irrelation of non-being--the separation of difference--defining the self other meta-relation in terms of differences--reifying the other into an object of differences to be 'studied'. Everyone has something in common with everyone else, but the more in common with identity, the stronger is the meta-relation between people--the greater and more intense the 'encounter' between self and other. But defining meta-relations exclusively in terms of shared sameness or difference leads to reification in both directions.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This sense of exclusive reification is the basis of spurious self-other identification and meta-relation. Meta-relation takes a life of its own--it is the 'life of dialogue'. This life has a direction ultimately beyond the control of either self or other and will become interpreted different by both self and other on the basis of their different 'personality matrices' of bundles of traits and their interrelations. Sharing a meta-relation leads to a generalization and 'fusion' of differences--to encounter--over time such that the personality matrices of self and other are brought into closer alignment over time. Encounter in meta-relation opens up new possibilities for growth and inter-identification between self and other. People learn how to react to, reject, accommodate, tolerate or assimilate the differences they find between one another and vice versa.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In asymmetrical meta-relations the reciprocity and interchange is more one directional--self or other attempt to control the direction of the life of the meta-relation. Reflexivity is impossible under such circumstances and such a relationship is the basis of an externalized form of power in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Symmetrical relationships based upon evenness of 'inter-change' or reciprocity is based upon shared similarities and mutual identification between self and other. Relationships which are asymmetrical are based primarily upon differences between people--there is no 'fusion of difference' but only 'separation of horizons.' Similarities tend to be denied or rejected, withdrawn and these result in spurious 'irrelation'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In spurious irrelation, self and other are separate and one is transformed into a thing, an instrument, or object of power of the other.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the reflexiveness of self-other meta-relation, there is a process of internalization or identification of the 'ego' of the values of the meta-relation--the other is incorporated within the sense of self. Often the internalization of this meta-relation, which begins in past or remote primary social relationships between parent and child or between siblings results in the intrinsic incorporation of difference and 'contradiction' such that self identity of the resulting ego is compartmentalized on the basis of inimical differences. This leads to front and back regions of the personality of the ego, to 'top dog' and 'under dog' intra-physic conflicts between the ego and the self.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">When our inter-relational mechanisms which serve to preserve the integrity of or sense of being breakdown under the stress of conflict, there occurs a disintegration of personality--the bundles of things no longer cohere into a general pattern of the self--they do not fit together anymore.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In or self-other meta-relations, we come to 'work out' or project these differences of ego identity upon the relationship, which entails a 'reification' of the other of the meta-relation as a thing. Such a projection is the recognition or imputation of the 'over emphasis' of difference in inter-human relationships--differences which are actually repressed within the self. In such cases, we are largely unable to have a genuine encounter experiences with people--they are narcissistic objects of our own projections, they are objects of reflection, but not reflexiveness. Our meta-relations and our 'inter-identity' in our social world becomes one predominantly of 'non-being'--spurious, separate and alienating.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is through learning how to engage in genuine self-other meta-relations, to unlearn difference within ourselves and between ourselves and the world, and to 'encounter' our world that we can resolve our intra-physic conflicts rooted to an unreal past and which keep our sense of self always imprisoned in a world of dependent, asymmetrical object relations. We actually gain self control over our own identities by releasing our projective need to control or be controlled by our worlds.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It must be understood that interpersonal differences and similarities are not so much real or actual as much as they are ascribed, imputed on the basis of metaphorical connection, symbolic identification or analogical evaluation. We are looking symbolically, hence reflexively, for ourselves in others, and for others in ourselves. And it is from this search and this 'inter-identification' that our sense of ego and sense of self ultimately depend. It is the analogical nature of these differences and similarities in meta-relation which is the basis of psychic meaning and being in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The other becomes the reference of significance for the self--what is called the significant reference other. If focusing upon similarities, the other becomes an object of empathetic emulation--subordinating self to authority of the other. To focus upon or emphasize differences exclusively in meta-relation is to concomitantly ignore similarities and to disallow similarities. It is to assert one sense of ego identity, or its authority, over the other. The other becomes negative 'counter-reference' significant other. In either case, the exclusive emphasis of either similarities or differences leads to a nomothetic pigeon holing of the identity of the other into the personality matrix of the self. Non-being of the meta-relation is the result, as in neither case is encounter with the full humanness or identity of the other as self recognized reflexively.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Focusing exclusively upon either differences or similarities is a social distancing mechanism necessary for the protection of ego identity. It is necessary for maintaining a reference relationship in which the other is a reflective object of the self and not a real person, or separate sense of self. The other person is merely a symbol, but not one which stands for itself. Masks, personas, assertion of authority, control and power, enforced anonymity or alienation are all social distancing mechanisms employed in defense of the ego. On the other hand, focusing upon similarities and differences in terms of sympathetic and empathetic resonances within the self leads to idiographic 'understanding' of the subjective other such that differences in time are worked out, fused, or tolerated. Difference remains, but becomes unimportant in terms of real difference and similarity.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is to be seen by extension that if a majority or the predominant part of social interrelationships in the world are based on non-being and are therefore spurious irrelation, then the social reality which is produced by the networks of these spurious relations will also be spurious. Such a social atmosphere will be characterized by its impersonalness and alienation, by the cultivation of front regions which mask the hidden networks of back regions and will foster asymmetrical irrelations between people. Such societies will in turn foster and promote 'spurious' social relationships and socialize personalities which internalize 'difference'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There are no 'purely' spurious or genuine cultures or relations or people--there are many mixed types of more or less spurious or genuine.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Sapir's dualism consists of a single continuum defined on the basis of how well a given culture provides a suitably adaptive environment for the individual. Genuine culture begins with the concerns of the individual needs while functioning as an integral and meaningful whole--'a richly varied and yet somehow unified and consistent attitude toward life in which no part of the general functioning brings with it a sense of frustration or misdirected or unsympathetic effort. (1924, page 410) Spurious culture is extraneous to the individual, cultivating an attitude of non-participation and alienation. While the genuine culture serves to nurture the creative potential of human beings, the spurious culture is inherently frustrating, fragmentary and wasting of human endeavor and sentiment.' (Grindal, 1979, page 13) (Lewis, unpublished manuscript, 1989)</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It follows from this that cultural orientation which promote beingness in identity lead to a creative fluorescence of 'civilization' in which the individual potentialities of the human being become promoted and 'nurtured' through genuine meta-relation and is allowed to express itself in the world in terms of the realization of greater creative possibility. It also follows that in civilizations in which spurious irrelation prevails, such personal realization through meta-relation becomes systematically frustrated and stemmed from further development through interpersonal irrelation. There is a net loss of creative productivity of people, and a net increase of authoritarianism and its social effects in social relations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Alfred Kroeber associated the growth and high points of development with culture historical developments of characteristic 'style type patterns' as well as with the frequency of culture historical personalities or of 'genius' of a reflective of the particular style of civilization. The determining factor of the appearance of bursts or clusters of genius in the course of a civilization culture historical development is due largely to the social context which either fosters or allows this rise of genius, or which systematically frustrate or prevent its occurrence. Culture historical contexts which become spurious tend to prevent the growth and development of stylistic genius of civilization, while genuine meta-relations within such contexts encourage and protect such development.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We have now an important linkage between individual experience of reality, between beingness and non-being, and the growth, development and demise in culture historical process of human civilization. Which comes first, the individual or the context of the individual's development, is largely a hen and egg question. They come together in a dialectic of human identity. What is important is to recognize how the statistical frequency and relative structural predominance of certain kinds of 'encounters' or face to face meta-relations, work consistently through extended networks and 'social movements' to turn the wheels of culture history and to describe the processual patterning of the rise and fall of human civilizations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We have in this a culture historical account of our own civilization--the promotion of the rugged individualist style of civilization through many genius who invented a whole new world and now the rise of a pervasive and predominant sense of non-being in social relationships which tends to frustrate and prevent the rise of the very kind of genius upon which its greatness was founded.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The dialectic of mind and world view are collective representations of the individual human being's experience of beingness and non-being in the world. Such experience is primarily subjective and phenomenological in the sense that it is derived from the recognition of one's self in the world, of the sentient possibilities of other's beingness, and of the dilemmas of death and separation and inexorable facts of life. It is subjective in the sense that it is a non-absolute and relative, yet non-arbitrary condition of human existence--recognition and understanding of the sense of identity and difference of beingness and non-being is relative, contextual dimensionality which as no external or a-priori standards of frames or references. It casts human existence, individually and collectively, in a shadow of indeterminacy such that there are few fixed, unchanging points of reference by which to anchor experience, understand change or about which to configure meaning in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Beingness and non-being are a contrapuntal dialectic which informs human existence with meaningfulness and ameaning--they are the essential counterpoint of or mythologies and our enacted social dramas. Being and non-being stand in unending opposition to one another and it is the dialectical tension of this contradiction which creates the antinomal and paradoxical ground of meaning in the world and which allows for transcendence of the dialectics through symbolic synthesis.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But beingness and non-being have a very different connotations for meaning in the world--following one way or the other has very interesting and problematic implications for how individuals and collectivities come to organize experience, mediate environments and structure their world view, and both lead down different pathways to changing which has very different consequences for humankind and the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Individuals may lead a life of beingness while the collective of which that person is a part may lead a different way of non-being, and vice versa. Though interconnected the dialectics of being for the individual is different than the dialectics of being for the collective--the way of life of the collective may lead to the individual's life ways, but the individuals way of life may also lead the life ways of the collective.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The dialectics of Mind, of being and non-being, and of Mindness and world view are founded upon the basic principles of identity and difference--principles of relation between the term and the thing, subject and object, self and other the signified and the signifier and the metaphor and the thing for which it stands. The dialectic of identity and difference informs all other dialectics as being between 'collectivizing/relativizing'--contrapuntal directions and tendencies of understanding. Identity and difference are inseparable, as identity must be defined by anti-thetical contraposition to relative difference, and vice versa. The principles of identity/difference are articulated quite simply and logically by the Theory of Sets. The principle of identity is expressed in terms of being; difference expresses non-being. Identity comes through the recognition of similarities and differences, and their fusion upon a common horizon of meta-relation. Differences comes through the separation of similarities from differences and the exclusive emphasis of each to the neglect of the other.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">DIALECTIC OF SELF AND OTHER</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Individuality is the 'idea' of Mind and is the synthesis of a dialectic between 'self centered identity' and 'other de-centered difference'--or the self defined idiographically in conjunction with the sense of personality development--biographically and longitudinally organized as a sense of inner directed continuity through time and across space and the 'otherness' of the self defined nomothetically as a bindle of relationships to other things and ultimately with other people, or other 'selves' in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Self in the world is defined diachronically as motion through time. Other of the world is defined synchronically as distance across space. The dialectic between self and other is a dialectic between time and space as well. Translation of self into other and of other into self is concomitantly the inter-translation between space and time. The dialectic between self and other is the spatio-temporal manifestation of Mind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Sense of self is the expression of the holothetic principle of Mind--'idea' expressed in terms of other 'ideas' which remain extrinsically defined in terms of other ideas of the world. The paradox of the dialectic is to synthetically transcend the dialectic while remain extrinsically defined in terms of other ideas of the world. The paradox of the dialectic is to synthetically transcend the dialectic while remaining within its circle. The function of a meta-language is to allow this transcendence.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this regard it is vitally important to note that the social sciences are largely, almost exclusively, the science of 'other identity' and so cannot transcend the dialectic of individuality. To 'de-center' the importance of the 'sense of self' in a systematic way is to attempt to subjugate the self to the dictates of the social order, and to define Mind in exclusive terms of social organization. It places the momentousness of Mind to the service of the momentum of culture history and reduces the importance of the self as the manifestation of Mind. In essence it constitutes a systematic denial of Mind as an ordering principle of human reality. Put another way, it constitutes a denial of beingness in the world by the affirmation of non-being of the world in terms of 'becoming' in a Perfect State of Mind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is not an accident that social sciences legitimate themselves in constructs and languages which are mostly spatial and synchronic in reference--the aim is a Logos of Perfect Space/Time in which disorder, randomness and uncertainty become minimized.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This emphasis upon other-identity has important implications for the role of the social sciences within a culture historical framework. The recovery of Mind depends upon the recovery of the sense of self from the anti-thetical principle of otherness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">BEINGNESS AS A NATURAL STATE OF MIND</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Beingness gains its identity in a dialectic with 'non-being'. Beingness identifies the reflexive identity of self and mind as an idea and a 'meta-relation' with the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Logos as 'natural systems theory' states that 'mind' as the natural logos of the human being has occurred as an order of reality which is guided by its own reasons--reasons which are basically 'meta-physical'. Yet meta-physicality of mind, of the 'beingness' of humankind, must have had its evolutionary origins in humankind's natural adaptation to selective forces in past environments. And as an adaptive mechanism, mind came into being long before humankind invented civilization in the historical sense--it came into being in the heads of individual's as they struggled for survival in hostile environments. It came into being among people whose only sense of social solidarity must have been 'natural' and 'mechanical'--who acted or had to learn to act, as individual 'culture bearers' rather than as 'organic specialists' whose adaptive success and survival came to depend more upon the success and survival of their 'social system' than upon their own individual state of being.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Neither were these primeval human beings very interested in the notions of progress or of 'becoming' or of perfection--being in its dialectic with possible non-being was an earnest, everyday problem of survival. The mind of human being developed to its full ecological and evolutionary significance long before the development of the civilized contexts for understanding 'ecology' and 'evolution'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Humankind has long existed in a 'primitive' state of beingness for a much longer span of time than we now know how to imagine. Perhaps mind as a culture historical phenomena had been in a long slumber before finally 'awakening' to its own self consciousness. We will never know.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Beingness as natural state of mind exists in the fear of death, in the daily confrontation with disorder and disintegration. As such there was no significant sense of 'becoming' except perhaps in the most mystical and magical of meanings.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">REASONS FOR BEING</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Many different reasons for being have been given--some better than others. Many are just lies, other sophisticated rationalizations 'in service of the ego'--others reasons are more pragmatic or more philosophical and others have been mandated by socio-economic survival or political struggle and confrontation. Systems always seem to have their own reasons, and if not, eventually will. Reason for being is not any or all the reasons we may give for our being--being in and of the world has its own reasons separable from the ones we may bring to it. Reason for being does not wait for our understanding of it, nor do our substitute reasons ever replace it. Reason (and unreason) for being is not necessarily 'rational' or 'logical'--reasons for being happens around our own ideas and in the absence of our intentions and plans.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But reason for being is not a divine spirit or a guiding force. It is not fate, nor destiny, nor the will of God or Allah, or even the action of logos or the science of truth. It is not an essence reducible by scientific or philosophic explanation--no psychoanalyst can mine its treasures or discover its depths in the individual psyche.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Difficult to put into words, it is more like willpower, but not unconscious or conscious motivation. It is collective in being shared, but it is not an internalized superego, a phenomena of mass movements or social hysteria. It is the function of mind, and the human expression of logos. It is not the deep, generative structure of structuralism. It is similar to the Dao that cannot be put into worlds or the way that isn't the way. It is not the same for all people, it varies with individual differences. It is an integrity of being that makes its own sense. It is a synergism and an encompassing totality arising from the fact of being itself rather than preceding or following it. It predetermines nothing except itself, and is predetermined by nothing but itself.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We cannot know it completely, objectively or however remotely, because we cannot separate ourselves from it, nor isolate others from it. It is the forest and we are the trees of the forest. It expresses itself through us but not because of us. We are its vehicles, its vessels, carrying its essence and substance into our future.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Though reason for being is not our reasons, it ultimately informs them with reason. Though we cannot control it, or comprehend it in any sense, we can come to know of it and understand some of it and describe what of it we know and understand. And whether it may be scientific or not is irrelevant. It is because we are and we are because it is, and just that is enough. Knowing and understanding it is enough in itself--its relevance is self evident. We will know it when we find it, because it will know us and have fond us.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Reason for being is the principle of mind. The study of culture history is the attempt to generalistically excoriate the principle of mind and our reason for being from the phenomena of everyday experience in the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">NONBEING AND THE RATIONALITY OF BECOMING</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The rationality of becoming is the scientific substitute for being. But no matter how progressive our rationality for becoming may be, however fulfilled or fulfilling in our lives, it never reveals our reason for being. It covers over the dialectic between being and non-being by incorporating the principle of change and the control of change, into its unfolding dialectic and thus makes non-being the basis of human identity. The rationality of becoming fails to transcend the dialectics of being and non-being but reverses its counterpoint.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The evolution of mind arose as the result of the logos of change. The rationality of becoming can be constrained as the principle of non-being of change which is directed or controlled--a sense of superimposing a pattern of structure of a non-existent future upon the sense of the present. Reason for being transcends the dialectic of being and non-being by an acceptance of the inevitability of change.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The rationality of becoming leads to a denial of the reason for being--an attempted escape from its inevitability, a desperate effort to purposefully forget it or to 'unlive it'. It attempts to substitute for reason for being in its own rationality of becoming something other than what one is. Its vicariousness searches for its own reason for being in the non-being of the possibilities of change itself.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Rationality of becoming lives in the world but is not of the world in the way that reason for being is. It serves a purpose of change. The principle of change becomes the principle of progressive evolution--change with a purpose.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">CHANGE AND NONBEING</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Part of our reason for being is the maintenance of a sense of continuity of consciousness through time, an identity of perception, a sense of constant, stable self. Though we watch ourselves gradually change, we like to think that there remains something fundamental which does not alter with circumstances or change with the seasons. It is vital to our being even though we cannot explain exactly what it is.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">If there is a universal principle or a logos, then it must be the principle of universal change--everything changes, constantly, gradually, rapidly, alternating, growing, expanding, moving, eroding, even our mind. Changes pervades our every and very experiences of the cosmos. Whether change in the universe is evolutionary or not remains to be discovered--it only seems so ordered in our locale. Universal change guarantees us that nothing remains the same forever, that all things are indeed temporary and ephemeral.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The observation of change, the ability to notice and to know change, both creates sense of being as somewhat resistant or defying change, and simultaneously challenges this sense by the possibility and the inevitability of non-being. Being and non-being rise in the world together as part of the dialectical mediation of change.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Perhaps it is our name, or our social and natural history which produces us a sense of continuity through time, inspite of changes. We recognize our reason for being in our offspring, and see the challenges to its survival in the death of friends and family. We may call it love, or nature, but we do not seek to analyze it or explain it. We act and make decisions on its behalf because we are a part of it and it is a part of us. But always we measure it by comparison with non-being in the world--that changes that go around us and through us which suggests our own impermanence and our own ephemerality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">NONBEING AND VICARIOUSNESS</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Recognition of the possibility of non-beingness and the denial of beingness leads also to the capacity for vicariousness--the substitution of possible states of non-beingness for beingness. Vicariousness is a qualified form of non-beingness as it covers over the sense of separation of death by the false sense of belonging derived from the imagined experience of another person's beingness. Vicariousness comes from our social identity, our knowledge of the beingness of the other as an experience of our possible non-beingness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The importance of the pathology of vicariousness in the constitution of the modern mind should not be underestimated--as modern beingness has become defined by the vicariousness of other identity to the point of loss of beingness in self identity. Part of this social vicariousness of non-beingness becomes expressed as a 'cult of individuality'--of the over emphasis upon the distinctiveness and importance of the self vis-à-vis other identity. The media promotes this pathology of vicariousness as a mechanism of the 'system' in the de-personalization of the beingness for the sake of its perpetuation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The principle of becoming is a special form of vicariousness. Becoming is also a form of non-beingness which becomes a substitute for beingness. Becoming substitutes the vicariousness of the other with the non-beingness of the self as the embodiment or progressive realization of a rational ideal--the substitution of the idea of natural mind by the ideal of perfect mind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It follows that a modern world built upon the principle of progress incorporating the principle of becoming and the modern mind of this principle of becoming, is a pathological world founded upon the vicariousness of non-being and the denial of beingness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">DEATH AND NONBEINGNESS</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Non-beingness is expressed symbolically as death and separation. Because death is the inevitable and ultimate consequence of life, the entire process of living can be looked upon as a gradual process of dying--every minor parting or permanent transition in life has a sense of separation and becomes a resonance of death. Death is a natural end state of life, and separation is a natural process of living.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Death and separation are the expressions of the principle of inexorable change in life--everything changes in time, and these changes over the long run are irreversible and permanent.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Death is the final, most irreversible change of living. It represents a great unknown. It is the only absolute horizon of our understanding and knowledge beyond which our consciousness cannot carry us.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Because it represents symbolically the unknown, death is the universal source of fear and the cause of anxiety over change and separation. Such fear and anxiety pervade our life, and are normal conditions of existence.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Pathology comes from the inability to deal with these fears and feelings of anxiety as natural states of living--leading to their denial or to the 'fear of fear' and to the anxiousness about anxiety. Denial of death as a pathological way of dealing with it leads to its covert sublimation in other ways--an unconscious symbolic preoccupation and fascination with dying and separation. Fear of fear and anxiousness about anxiety are part of this unconscious denial--obsessive expressions of this fear and anxiety which become inordinately powerful and suggestive in the daily rituals of living.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The possibility of the denial of death comes from the recognition and possibility of denial of beingness--as a consequence of mind it comes from the self recognition of the dialectic between beingness and non-beingness. It is concomitant to the reflexive identity of self and mind. Like Versus and Falsus, the ability to apprehend the identity of truth, (or the truth of identity) always also opens up the possibility of untruth and non-identity. We cannot have knowledge and understanding of truth and beingness without the understanding of the possibility of untruth and non-beingness.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">BEING AND BECOMING</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A human being is more than a bundle of traits--more than behavior plus mentality, more than a set of psychological processes (perception, learning, memory, thought, intelligence, skill, communication, motivation, emotion, personality) more than a name, a wardrobe, a creature with a home life and a work life, more than a 'culture bearing animal' or 'symbolic creature'. A human being is more than a body with a soul and a mind and a shadow--a human being is more than a 'thing'. Human being is a living state, a super organic condition, a synergism of reality, a unity of reality and undivided totality of experience. He cannot so much address it as be addressed by it. We cannot know it so much as be known by it--it always encompasses our comprehension--always 'something more' than our 'nothing buts'. Human being exists in the world and happens of the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To say that 'human being' is an oxymoron of knowledge and understanding--it compels an unnatural kind of self reflexivity, an apperceptive awareness of our own being in and of the world--trying to 'objectify' the intrinsically 'subjective'. We say 'well of course human being, what else?' Indeed what else can there be? To subtract either the human or the being from the equation of experience--to inform knowledge or understanding 'as if' either were unnecessarily absent, is a falsification of actual experience. Of course we can imagine with a high degree of scientific certainty that should all humankind perish in turn, the universe would continue to exist without us, but our essential experience of it would have vanished into nothingness and along with us, the knowledge that there is a universe. There is no point quibbling.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Perhaps it is better to say 'beingness' instead of just 'being' to convey the 'sense' of 'state' or 'condition', to better emphasize its unequivocal experientiality or self evident essence. It is perhaps the only true synthetic a-priori which necessarily comes before everything else. Being has always been enough.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">And yet in our world dominated by scientific rationality it is no longer simply 'to be' as a unquestionable given, as an uncontestable 'fact' of experience itself. (and it probably never really, absolutely has been) Being human in the modern sense has come to mean much more than simply human being. The principle of progress and its premises of perfectionism make it imperative that we will 'become' something more than we 'are' or have 'unbecome' something that we 'were' before. The need to 'become' has its own 'superhuman methods' and its own 'superhuman madness'. And 'becoming human' is never quite enough.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">PERFECT MIND AS A STATE OF PATHO-LOGOS</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Perfect mind arose from the principle of becoming which became a substitute for the dialect between being and non-being--it arose from a denial of non-being and hence implies a denial of being. Its aim is a perfect logos, a state of perfect space and perfect time, from which non-being as an imperfect state is exorcised.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To the extent that perfect mind is based upon a principle of becoming which denies the dialectic of being and non-being, it must be construed as an 'unnatural' hence 'pathological' state of mind. It must be construed as an intrinsically maladaptive kind of mind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is not difficult to look around and see social pathological states of collective mentality which exist as self fulfilling prophecies of their own culture historical traditions--modern militarism, MAD and the Pentagon's power are peculiarly pertinent examples. Implicit to these pathological states of collective mentality is a shared delusions. Such social pathologies have as their purpose not the 'beingness of the mind' in terms of the self, but in the destruction of the self in the service of the other--or of a symbolically depersonalized 'system'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Rational idealism and scientific rationalism promotes a logo-centrism which leads to reification of abstractions and to a misplaced concretization--this kind of logo-centrism can be seen to promote a frame of mind which aims towards a perfect state of mind which is reinforced by and reinforces a perfect social system.</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER">PART VI</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">CULTURE HISTORY</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="2"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/hughmlewis/">by Hugh M. Lewis</a></font></b></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Superman has long been a mythological archetype of many different cultures. It is a human of supernatural origins and a human upbringing who exhibits superhuman physical strengths and abilities, which he uses in a series of trials and contests with monsters, villains, Gods and with other men. Behind Superman is always a female seductress who threatens to rob him of his powers. The Hebrews had their Samson, the Greeks had Hercules. Ancient Mesopotamian civilization had Gilgamesh, the Indian had Arjuna. There have been many variants of this common theme, and the point of variation upon a common theme is as important as the understanding of the essential structure of the theme itself.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It was Frederick Nietzche who gave to western rational philosophy the contrast between Superman and the slave, superman being the superior man who was the goal of evolutionary 'survival of the fittest'. Recent German ideology capitalized upon this mythological theme as a core archetype of their superior civilization which was rooted in their genetic history, and a unified, strong nation was mobilized under a fanatical leader to go to war with the world to conquer and dominate it militarily.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this instance we have a clear example of how the power of a mythological theme can be used to foster collective ideological illusion around which shrewd and cunning leaders may mobilize the people of an 'ethno-nation' for fanatical action. 'Understanding kills action, for in order to act we require the veil of illusion…' (Frederick Nietzche, The Birth of Tragedy)</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">All cultures have their different hero myths. We have whole pantheon and Halls of Fame devoted to the greats of baseball, football and basketball. We have political heroes and folk heroes, we have war heroes, scientist heroes and even industrialist heroes. Heroes become the stuff of which legends and children's day dreams are made of and from our legends come the justification of the greatness of our cultural traditions and the object lessons for how we spend our lives. Now we have a whole movie industry which regularly creates and recreates these hero myths in living color, to give our collective illusions a substantial sense of perceptual realism, however two dimensional and electronic. And film and TV creates its own legends, stars, great directors and great roles which provide us with yet other pantheons of Oscar winners, wax museums and parades.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Humans seem to need heroes to serve as role models of exemplary behavior and superhuman feats and as paragons of our cultural values and virtues. They are the semi-human props for our everyday illusions and the superhuman solutions for our existential problems. Everyone loves a winner and no one wants a loser.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In our daily performances and enactments of our cultural values, in our recreations of our mythological characters, supermen and heroes, we can see clearly how myth may both serve to reflect and to regenerate our cultural traditions and inform our lives and our daily destinies with special significances of which we may quite unselfconsciously aware. For us they are reflective of our cultural orientations, but they are frequently not reflexive of our own realities.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We sometimes seem to so need our hero myths and legends that we are quite willing to completely disregard the kernel of historical truth lying at the center of the story in order to better enjoy the flesh of the fruit grown around it. In our culture, we consume our heroes as we consume our junk food and our material possession, to use them up at our convenience and then discard forever the pithy remnants into the junk heaps of our buried and forgotten history.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It has been the study of culture history which has provided us with an intellectual window onto this cultural process of mythology, hero making and consuming, the illusion and superhuman spirit of ideology it cultivates and the sense of history that’s inevitably left behind. It is the study of culture history which best answers our 'why' questions about the happenings of history and the events of culture, because it allows us to paint the sense of holism and animation that imbibed a people with a collective purpose and orientation and gave to their culture the breath of history. Culture history elucidates the integrity and synergism of a people within a given period and place, and shows how its mythology is related to its language and psychology, and how its history and ideology is related to its mythology and how its sense of civilization, its sense of individual self, gender, class, and even its ecology and experiences of its environment are conditioned through and by its mythology. It also shows how this mythology is also rooted in its geography, its ecology, its economy, its sociality, its customs and manners, its politics and its history. In short within the study of culture history everything is somehow related to everything else, however indirectly or remotely or superficially.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">For those students of culture who would seek to know a foreign people, or even to study themselves, the firm foundation of the understanding of the people's culture history is of paramount and prerequisite importance in the contextualizing and grounding of their studies, no matter how scientific, specific, a historical or sociological. It is foolish for such students to conduct research of any kind without a well rounded appreciation of the language, culture and history of the people whom they study. Without such culture historical understanding, such researcher's inevitably fall prey to either the mythologies of the people's that they've ignored, to their own culture historical mythologies that they have ignored reflexively in themselves, or else the results of their studies will stand apart from the whole fabric of human consciousness itself, as something disconnected, irrelevant and worst of all, trivial--of little or no value at all in any culture historical framework.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The culture history of a people is similar to the people's own 'ethno-history' or 'folk history' except that culture history comprehends this insider's frame of reference as well as the outsider's frame of reference , within a dialectic of views that leads to its synthesis. Culture history stays with no single viewpoint, but seeks a wide variety of perspectives in its encompassment of the contexts of mind in which a particular people are situated. Because an infinite number of such viewpoints are potentially possible, the program of culture history is never finished, its images and stories of a people never complete.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Several key themes characterize the study of culture history and distinguishes it as separate from other kinds of studies of people. These themes are:</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mythology; culture history is preeminently a study of mythology--its common themes, variations, ranges, histories and 'structures'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Tradition; culture history is basically a study of a people's common or separate sense of tradition, how it relates to their histories, folklore, mythologies, customs and character.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Language; culture history seeks to study language in its many modes and mediums of expression, especially from the standpoint of its semanticity, its pragmatics and its metaphorical connotations and connections.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Customs and values; culture history seeks to understand a people's cultural orientations, values and how these cohere to give cultural life consistency and efficacy, customs and constraints, rituals and ceremonies which surround, explicate or deviate from such value systems and cultural orientations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Stereotypes; culture history seeks to comprehend and understand the kinds of 'stereotypes' are used within a grouping of people or are used about such people. Culture history can be said to deal in stereotypes, in the dialectics of their social cultural construction and critical de-construction.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Social structure; somewhat surprisingly, culture history, to be complete, must understand the regular patternings of political, economic, social and religious behaviors of people, as these 'structures' interrelate functionally and organizationally to give a long lasting and pervasive sense of 'structure' common to a collectivity of people.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Cultural geography; the landscape, environment, ecology, means of adaptation are all necessary to a complete picture of a group's culture history.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Integration; culture history attempts an inquiry into the systemic and symbolic integration of a people's culture historical realities, to demonstrate the many possible interrelationships with in a collectivity of people.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Variation; culture history attempts to understand the many historical and geographical variations of the cultural themata around which a grouping of people are organized, as well as the individual ranges of variation between individual' within groupings and the ranges of variation of culture histories of different groupings of people.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Civilization; civilization is construed as culture historical process which gives to a grouping of people a collective consciousness of being distinct and unique. Civilizations may be great or small.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Collective representations; religious beliefs, attitudes, symbolisms, superstitions which informs a people of their culture historical identity and of the identity of others.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">'Mentality'; culture history has always been a study of human 'mentality' as this may be different or similar between groupings of people in time and place--to understand the basis of these differences and similarities.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">History; culture history is the study of the 'culture of history' and the 'history of culture' as well as the study of 'meta-history' as a dialectic between 'stories of people's past' and 'people's past itself'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Culture; culture history is also, simultaneously a study of human culture as an organizing metaphor for the pan human phenomena and experience of things cultural--and of its many thematic variation in time and place as well as the 'continuum' of pan human 'culture' in the 'structure of the long run'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Contextuality; culture history is an attempt to contextualize and understand the inherent background contextuality of time and place in which a people are situated. Contexts are relational frameworks which provide a sense of the interrelationships and interrelatedness of people within social and natural environments through time.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In the study of culture history no kind of knowledge or information is beyond its purview of importance. The aim of such study is always comprehensive in seeking a compendium of understanding about any grouping of people. As such psychology and phenomenology are also valuable perspectives of a culture historical approach, as would be physical anthropology or sociology or even sociobiology. The culture historical paradigm is encompassing and non-exclusive in its orientation. As such it is also necessarily generalistic and unparticularistic in its synthesis.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">*****</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The notion of what is 'general' is better restated as an issue of 'generalia' (things in general; general principles or terms) have referring mainly to ideas, notions, terms, and systems of such things. 'General' is defined as 'the whole; the total; that which comprehends all or the chief part; opposed to particular.' or as 'applicable to or involving the whole or every member of a group. 2. Widespread; prevalent. 3. Not restricted or specialized. 4. True or applicable in most but not all cases. 5. Not precise or detailed. 6. Diversified…' In this context general might also be referred to as 'generality' or as 'generality' defined as 'the quality or state of being general. 2. The main body; the hulk, the greatest part…3. An idea or expression of a general, indefinite and vague nature; a general statement or principle' or as 'generally' as 'in general; extensively though not universally; most frequently but not without exceptions. 2. Without detail; in the whole, taken together' or in terms of 'things generalizable' or as 'generalization'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">'General' then has several interrelated connotations of theoretical, philosophical, metaphysical, comprehensive and universality of meaning--'as broadly based, deeply significant, as widely applicable as possible'. Comprehensive generality as a way of comprehending holistically an undifferentiated human reality is preferable over a notion of strict universality with the connotations of 'absoluteness, completeness, finality or ultimate'.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Being general and a generalizing study, it is also a study of generalization about human reality. Culture history tends to speak of groupings of people as if they were whole and in a sense complete, and to some extent isolated and independent of an outside world. There is a search for an overall pattern of configuration of culture about some central archetype or model or paradigm. The classic conception of culture historical study has been the depiction of a culture as a wheel with spokes which radiate from a central hub or axis around which the wheel of culture turns. Each of its spokes is an aspect of that culture which converges towards a center.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">But the generalizing nature of culture history is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness, and this seems to hook it upon the horns of an unresolvable dilemma which 'stems from the chastening insight that no culture can be mapped out in its entirety, but no element of this culture can be understood in isolation…' (Gombrich, page 41)</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It must be understood that the study of generalization in culture history is a necessary way of proceeding toward a holistic understanding of culture history. Generalizations based on patterns of phenomena are formulated in order to then be 'de-constructed', reevaluated and reconstructed. Though this process theoretically never ends, through it we are provided with a multiplicity of possible patterns and generalizations from which themselves certain meta-order paradigms emerge in the generalistic understanding of a group of people. It is not the generalizations themselves which are important, except as vehicles of understanding, but it is appreciation of the people and a grasp of mind which characterizes their group that is the final aim of culture history.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From this standpoint, culture history must be understood as a dialectical methodology which always poses a paradigmatic thesis to then contrapose antithetical counterexamples or exceptions through which conjunction yields a synthesis of mind. The important concerns are not the thesis or anti-thesis, or even the synthesis itself, but the act of the dialectical process itself in revealing mind and human reality. The culture history stands outside of the terms of the dialectic, while still enacting the dialectic, and studies the unfolding of the process in its entirety from an uninvolved distance which allows the student to step outside of the hermeneutic circle of ideology and history, and to become reflexive about this hermeneutic circle as well as about his/her own dialectical involvement in it.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There then occurs in the study of culture history a fusion of horizons between the student and the people whom he studies, a kind of identity of difference which allows cultural generalizations to be made and to stand for themselves without an involvement in the hermeneutic history of their production. These generalizations remain as necessary vehicles of the hermeneutic process, but do not stand as ideological props, paradigms of power or as mythological charters.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">******</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p>