It may be something of a truism that to understand war, one must first understand peace. It is of a similar kind of statement to assert the inverse – that to understand peace, one must first understand war. What then of attempting to understand the unified totality of conflict and harmony? When inspecting the unified […]
You would think that any self-respecting species possessing intellectual and technological aptitude sufficient to fathom the deepest mysteries of the Cosmos might also be able to avoid its own imminent catastrophic dissolution and descent into conflict, environmental disassembly, geopolitical dissonance and self-destruction. Not, as it turns out, this distributed material and symbolic human being within […]
There is quite a lot to be said for the psychological dynamics of a partisan pathology (on all sides of any conflict or adversarial competition) that can only ever define itself reflexively in opposition to and by difference from a fictionalised, idealised and almost entirely abstract fantasy of Other. It is an infantile symmetry that […]
There is an irreducible enigma in the aspiration to peace through structured, ordered methods. Every structure, system, taxonomy, ontology and patterned application of rationality or logic to complex problems always (ALWAYS) becomes another component in the hyper-inflating, combinatorial reference space of the problem that is being addressed – in language, law or perception. Each new […]
Notice how, if we are conceptually and cognitively able to step back and observe the forest rather than the trees, that the primary information system function here is that of the recursive self-propagation of soliton-like, continuously self-propagating waveforms in patterns of behaviour and thought. Those artefacts that are produced at times of duress and stress, […]
Wilfrid Sellars characterised the aim of philosophy “(…) abstractly formulated, (…) to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”. The foundational discontinuity of history and in our current Global “civilisation” (such as it is) that leads us into endlessly futile internecine […]
There are senses in which the act of definition and assertion of epistemological necessity or structure upon any context, evidence or experience is already (in a limited sense) an act of violence, of difference and disassembly. Our taxonomies and lexicons are in many ways not of the world so much as they are forced upon […]
The world must be considered as a single, unified or gestalt and autonomously self-propagating information and energy-processing (i.e. complex, computational) system if it is ever to be successfully negotiated or shaped. Conflict, competition, socioeconomic or geostrategic dissonance and entropy adopt unexpected forms when viewed from Global Systems perspectives. Complex adaptive systems (such as is this […]
As with any other cyclic return – including conflict, revolution and large-scale systemic collapse – a holistic and complex systems analysis suggests a few salient points. Feudal systems of warring tribes return again and again (wearing different uniforms and wielding new vocabularies or other socioeconomic and technological accessories) because they are the optimally-concise self-organisational method […]
I can’t help but wonder if one day, and in the same way that trench warfare might now strike us as such incomprehensible futility and carnage, future generations will look back upon this moment and all of our own fast-spiralling technological arcs and grammars of adversarialism as not being a difference in kind so much […]
Which begs the question: if individuals tend on average towards a path of least resistance and select (or become selected by) a singular – or authoritarian – narrative interpretation and filter of their world, why is it that these systems in which there is no (or at least a sudden vacuum of) overarching meta-narrative find […]
Context: Sixth mass extinction of wildlife accelerating, scientists warn …and all the while, humanity stumbles and lumbers around from one profoundly tragic self-inflicted catastrophe to another, all but blind to this darkening existential threat and profane insult to life itself that emanates like dusty, choking smoke and tar from the ill-purposed machines of civilisation. What […]
