Here is a calculus of sorts for critically navigating the “news” and “analysis;” Web, TV and radio broadcasts of what Republicans say about Democrats, what everyone says about Obama and everything else. It works to use the imagery of complexity and chaos theories to understand global turbulence, which we all experience personally as living from one emergency to the next. In "Chaos, Courage, Choice & Creativity," Frederick David Abraham (1995) captures the poignancy of our historical period as the bifurcation point:
There is a point, the bifurcation point, at which the attractor that is in the process of transforming does not exist: There is neither egg nor chick. This is the old meaning of gap, but mathematical dynamics does not use the term chaos for its semantic roots,…
The bifurcation point is sort of a gap, but it is not possessed of a chaotic attractor. …. In mathematical dynamics the bifurcation point is very unstable (rather than chaotic). (p.68)
Abraham describes the gap in terms of the psyche as a system. The systems analysis goes like this:
A slight alteration of force can tip the system back to the previous attractor or lack thereof, or on to a new attractor or loss thereof, in the portrait. However, it takes energy to change the control in order for this to happen, to create this small change in the balance of conflicting, cooperating, and interacting forces. (p.68)
From the mathematical dynamic point of view, one type of choice is seen as resetting of the "initial position" into a different basin of attraction…. A more active type of choice is to navigate along the controls of the whole potential dynamical scheme, learned or imagined, to create new possible attractors of self. For the psyche, this is individuation, a process of bifurcation leading to a greater complexity and maturity. The psyche, as a dynamical scheme, views potential worlds and chooses among them. (p. 68)
Think 9/11 as the occasion and the Bush Administration’s response as the force that sent us back to an earlier time. Bush et al catapulted the entire international system back to a previous way of perceiving and being in the world…. Although not necessarily a function of 9/11, the appointment of Alito to the Supreme Court certainly set back legal arguments to pre-Enlightenment conversations. In his Senate confirmation hearings he denied the role of his “background” on his thinking and decisions…… This is not a 21st century mind for Alioto may have not even visited Freud or Jung, let alone rejected them.
The current stream of Republican rhetoric maintains the status quo because it ensures that we continue to process habits of mind that are out of synch with where the world could progress. We are all; I mean all of us, in this together. Republican rhetoric and the noise of news and analyses with which it is processed, are tethers, keeping the planet and billions of lives tied to smaller futures. Or, according to Abraham’s explanation, keeping us from ‘navigat[ing]e along the controls of the whole potential dynamical scheme, learned or imagined, to create new possible attractors.”
Among the controls we navigate, see:
Family of Secrets by Russ Baker
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/05/26/family_of_secrets/?ref=fpd
References:
Abraham, Frederick David (1995). Choas, Courage, Choice & Creativity. Psychological Perspectives. Issue Thirty: Quantum Psychology
