If I had any effect on this world beyond the narrow confines and threshold of inconsequence that is the effective boundary condition of the vast majority of our lives, I would ask some serious questions. If the ability to peacefully resolve the inevitability of internal systemic entropy is an aptitude that in successful exercise effectively and irrevocably proves the validity, intelligence and wisdom of an ideological system, does the threat of aggression and intimidation (on any side of a debate) indicate rank desperation and intellectual failure?
It is a fact that any sufficiently sophisticated or complex system will eventually come across the intractable enigmas of compound information entropy and internal logical incompleteness or inconsistency; these are consequences of an unavoidable recursive enigma generated by that inflection point at which a system of thought or organisational pattern eventually and inevitably encounters itself as an object of its own introspection. The ways in which these issues are addressed define the parabolic arc of success or failure for any system of thought. Assertions of aggression or intimidation indicate failures of both intellect and ideology. I am keen to see what, if any, enduring resolution and innovative response to this current dissonant situation in Hong Kong reveals itself or otherwise spontaneously emerges.
For any movememt, ideology or nation interested in successfully playing the long-game of history, self-propagating adversarial conflicts represent an atavistic throwback to an ancient worldview and premodern political sensibility that has long-since outlived its value and utility. An extremely complex world requires similarly complex applications of intelligent heuristics to negotiate and solve. To find an optimal solution, and as a general principle, seek that answer which both generates and self-propagates itself.
Whoever masters problem-solving heuristics in the hyper-inflating logical spaces of contemporary human cognitive, cultural and technological existence, masters the world. Conflict is never the clever answer – descent into argument transparently demonstrates loss of control, not mastery of it. The current difficult situation in Hong Kong is just one problem-space in a (very) troubled world and the systemic reflections offered here apply much more broadly across many nations, dissonant contexts and systems of thought than just this one salient contemporary issue of social unrest. I do not pretend to have any answers, I only have questions: I wonder who could ever untangle this Gordian Knot of human beings being so intransigently and intractably human? Continuity is everywhere offset and set against against change and it is almost everywhere very poorly managed; the underlying psychological aspects are rarely, if ever, acknowledged and are certainly never addressed in a mature manner.
The international society of nations, such as it is, is not very often seeking clever solutions to the problems that it itself is generating, across all countries and conflicts. Each instance of dissonance is a microcosm of a global property of discontinuity, a distributed planetary discord that is oblivious to nation or ideology and that we all are dealing with, wherever we are, and each in our own way. We all share much more than we think we do but the limitations and reflexively self-interested biases of human psychology obscures the underlying interdependence of the world. It is for this reason that I am uncertain we can make it through the Great Filter of self-extinguishing planetary civilisation.
Daedelus Kite 