Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

Dear Richard,

...I ask some variation of this question: What would it
take for you personally, Richard Emery, to wake up one morning, pick
up a machete, go next door, kill your neighbor and dismember his body,
kill his children, rape his wife, and then kill her and dismember her
body?

Jesus, John, you made me spill my morning coffee!

Originally Posted by Croakmore

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

Dear Richard,

...I ask some variation of this question: What would it
take for you personally, Richard Emery, to wake up one morning, pick
up a machete, go next door, kill your neighbor and dismember his body,
kill his children, rape his wife, and then kill her and dismember her
body?

Jesus, John, you made me spill my morning coffee!

Personalized spill-proof coffee mug

Originally Posted by Croakmore

I rather agree with Zar about ontological "forces," although I'm unsure how to measure them.

I translate "ontological forces" as forces relating to essence or the nature of being, which doesn't mean anything to me.

Mike, have you considered portraying your mechanistic theory as some kind of a simple math model based upon your principles of covariation? This might actually work in an interesting way if you weighted the measures of P, F, Pf, B etc., so as to function in a zero-sum context? The math expression "varies as" (I can't print the symbol here) becomes the "mechanical" algorithm for, maybe, a "concordance-discordance matrix" in a Condorcet decision methdology.

I don't see the applicability of a voting method to a model for the saeculum. I do use a mathematical model for the price cycle in the form of difference equations (a discrete representation of a differential equation). I have played with a Boolean rules-based model for the generational constellation effect.

Originally Posted by Mike Alexander '59

Originally Posted by Croakmore

I rather agree with Zar about ontological "forces," although I'm unsure how to measure them.

I translate "ontological forces" as forces relating to essence or the nature of being, which doesn't mean anything to me.

Mike, have you considered portraying your mechanistic theory as some kind of a simple math model based upon your principles of covariation? This might actually work in an interesting way if you weighted the measures of P, F, Pf, B etc., so as to function in a zero-sum context? The math expression "varies as" (I can't print the symbol here) becomes the "mechanical" algorithm for, maybe, a "concordance-discordance matrix" in a Condorcet decision methdology.

I don't see the applicability of a voting method to a model for the saeculum. I do use a mathematical model for the price cycle in the form of difference equations (a discrete representation of a differential equation). I have played with a Boolean rules-based model for the generational constellation effect.

Mike,

1. I tend to lump ontogeny with ontology in a biological context that is concerned with the development of the "being" — the individual organism — developmental processes like embryonic development. They could also refer to generational development, say from child to adult. But I'm not so sure about the "forces."

2. Condocet probably was a bad idea. I was thinking a saeculum goes through some kind of concordance vs. discordance cycling over resources (e.g., alternating lynx/hare populations)...nevermind.

—Croakmore

John,

I'm struggling to comprehend the meme of biological life and how it got here, so taking on the meme of "mob psychology" is almost too much for me to bear. It has arbitrary properties, I suspect.

—Croakmore

John,

Would you say that this disturbance in SoCal is evidence supporting the “dynamics” of “mob psychology”? I might agree.

Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, a potential presidential contender who worked with Kennedy on the issue, told reporters the street demonstrations had made an impact. "All those people who were demonstrating are not here illegally. They are the children and grandchildren" of those who may have been, he said.

What bothers me, though, is how to convincingly measure the “energy” in your alleged “mob psychology” concept. In a catastrophe theory context you could say that some kind of a wave function collapses from its endogenous energy buildup. Any thoughts?

—Croakmore

Originally Posted by Mike Alexander '59

Originally Posted by Zarathustra

As you know, I am not as disinclined as you to see endogenous and ontological forces at work in the saeculum.

Partly because I do not know what ontological force means. As for endogenous, my model is endogenous wrt the society that experiences the saeculum and so it does involves endogenous forces, so to speak.

Where I see the difference between our viewpoints is in the actor. For me the actor are individual people whose response is depending on both their enviroment (which is produced by the negative feedback mechanism) and my their programing (their previous experiences that have shaped the way they view the world).

You appear to see the larger society as actor, but I may be wrong there.

Mike, by "ontological forces" I mean to say forces working on the psyche that pull it in of four, fundamental, indeed ontological, directions. This is the Ontological Quadrality (Ken Wilber's "Four Quadrants") I've written about. Which does the individual and/or society emphasize at any given time? Agency or Membership? Subjective Self or Objective Person?

There are bound to be exogenous forces that have forced humans to pull out from the center and emphasize just one or two aspects of the four (that's not to say exclusively, just in emphasis).

Take, e.g., a severe crisis. All other things being equal (and in traditional societies that tended to be the case) this would exogenously create emphasis on the objective and communal -- outside world focus and safety in numbers. However, there are two other fundamental aspects (faces or sides to the human holon) that by definition cannot be ignored. This tension will automatically work to bring the crisis emphasis back into a more psychologically healthy equilibrium, and do so endogenously.

I suspect what started the saeculum is an intitial perturbation that sent this ontological balance off kilter. Then the natural tendency to put things back in balance would overshoot at first (pent up momentum overcoming intertia) but unless something else interferes, equilibrium (or something close to it) would eventually be achieved. Oftentimes, additional perbutations would disrupt the equalization (famines, invaders from the Asian steppes, etc) and keep it going along to some extent. But given enough time the swings would become milder or at least less rythmic.

What perhaps keeps the modern saeculum going is an increased pace of change, the acceleration of physical, social, and cognitive maturity in youth, and radically increased interpersonal interaction. These combine to make the saeculum stronger in modern society and almost entirely endogenous.

Or maybe not. :wink:

To answer your question of do I emphasize society over the individual as the actor, the answer is no, if by "society" you mean a physical community of human beings. I think they play a co-equal role overall.

But in another sense, the answer is yes. Please see my answer to Mr. E, below.

Originally Posted by Croakmore

I rather agree with Zar about ontological "forces," although I'm unsure how to measure them. Evolution of the Darwinian kind, for example, does not take place in individual organisms. Something bigger is happening. Sean thinks that an individual will reflect its biological history in its early development — that its ontogeny reflects ("recapitulates") its phylogeny — but many biologists continue to refute ORP, as I do to some persnickity degree.

To me the genomic message is carried by individuals, but they are mere quanta to a larger entanglement engaged in a bottom-up (open-ended) style evolutionary career. The genome is not the individual. And it is the genome that evolves . . . .

Mr. E, I believe what you're trying to say is that the human genome is not all there is. What of the "Memenome"? That is actually more important today. Humans did not suddenly develop genes that brought them from a few million hunter-gatherers to a 6.5 billion aggregation capable of going to the moon! This was all memes.

Within this context, individual humans are akin to "cells" -- entities that can harbor, protect, mutate, and transfer memes. Memes are where the action is. But as with biological evolution, the replicatons are useless without a viable vessel/vehicle.

RE: "Ontological forces"

Ken Wilber says in his "An Integral Theory of Consciousness":

Thus, you can perhaps start to see why I maintain that an `all-quadrant, all-level' approach is the minimum degree of sophistication that we need into order to secure anything resembling a genuinely integral theory of consciousness. And remember, all of this is suggested, not by metaphysical foundations and speculations, but by a rigorous data search on evidence already available and already largely uncontested.

I don’t know how Wilber can so easily dismiss “metaphysical foundations” when he insists on a soul, a god (with a capital "G"), and Gaia (there's that "G" again). But I like his quadrant anyway. Intriguing. I’ll be taking a closer look at it, trying not to be too spooked by the spirits.

—Croak

Originally Posted by Croakmore

RE: "Ontological forces"

Ken Wilber says in his "An Integral Theory of Consciousness":

Thus, you can perhaps start to see why I maintain that an `all-quadrant, all-level' approach is the minimum degree of sophistication that we need into order to secure anything resembling a genuinely integral theory of consciousness. And remember, all of this is suggested, not by metaphysical foundations and speculations, but by a rigorous data search on evidence already available and already largely uncontested.

I don’t know how Wilber can so easily dismiss “metaphysical foundations” when he insists on a soul, a god (with a capital "G"), and Gaia (there's that "G" again). But I like his quadrant anyway. Intriguing. I’ll be taking a closer look at it, trying not to be too spooked by the spirits.

He's not dismissing those foundations, per se, he's saying that there is data to back up his contention that there are memetic levels (and their objective manifestations) and that there are four quadrants. As for God, his is decidedly NOT the mythical god (or gods) of traditional religions. Though he'll say that said mythical deity is a perfectly healthy manifestation of the spiritual at a certain stage -- very roughly concrete operational awareness (ontogenically) and early-to-mid civilization (phylogenically). And yes, Wilber is a soft ORPist (where do you think I got it from?), though he wouldn't put it that way.

I am very happy to hear that you're taking a look at his four quadrant tool. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. Also, Kiff has become quite knowledgeable of Wilber as late.

Sean, I printed out Wilber's article on "An Integral Theory of Consciousness" to have a careful read of it, which I did this afternoon. Here's my honest assessment.

I once was enchanted with Eric Jantsch, Erwin Laszlo, and a few others who took the discussion in a way that eventually escaped my interest. I tend to see them as the New Age group, perhaps unfairly. To me, Wilber fits right in there. He would appeal to those who fancy the metaphysics. And I must admit his Cartesian projection appeals to me. While I think his argument is well posed and well written, I don't find answers that help me with my list of important questions about consciousness, integral or otherwise. Why not? Because I get the feeling that Wilber relies too much on "evidence" from psychotherapy and developmental psychology — fields I happen to distrust.

Is consciousness really a psychological problem? I don't think so.

I usually put this stuff aside, judging it to be rooted in phenomenology. My interests favor two other kinds of informative paradigms that neither accept nor deny phenomenology; they don't really need it. They are algorithmic and analogous domains of information "processing" (or "propagation"), on which I affix my meme of consciousness.

And, frankly, I don't know if a meme is an algorithm, an analog, or a phenomenon. Maybe all three. But I am aware of my own contempt for developmental psychologists, which may not be fair, but it seems to be necessary.

—Croak

Originally Posted by Croakmore

Sean, I printed out Wilber's article on "An Integral Theory of Consciousness" to have a careful read of it, which I did this afternoon. Here's my honest assessment.

I once was enchanted with Eric Jantsch, Erwin Laszlo, and a few others who took the discussion in a way that eventually escaped my interest. I tend to see them as the New Age group, perhaps unfairly. To me, Wilber fits right in there. He would appeal to those who fancy the metaphysics. And I must admit his Cartesian projection appeals to me. While I think his argument is well posed and well written, I don't find answers that help me with my list of important questions about consciousness, integral or otherwise. Why not? Because I get the feeling that Wilber relies too much on "evidence" from psychotherapy and developmental psychology — fields I happen to distrust.

Is consciousness really a psychological problem? I don't think so.

I usually put this stuff aside, judging it to be rooted in phenomenology. My interests favor two other kinds of informative paradigms that neither accept nor deny phenomenology; they don't really need it. They are algorithmic and analogous domains of information "processing" (or "propagation"), on which I affix my meme of consciousness.

And, frankly, I don't know if a meme is an algorithm, an analog, or a phenomenon. Maybe all three. But I am aware of my own contempt for developmental psychologists, which may not be fair, but it seems to be necessary.

—Croak

Jantsch, Laszlo, and their ilk, are just a small number of those he incorporates into his metamodel. And as for catagorically rejecting developmental psychologists, I submit that is a dangerous bias. With all due respect, I find it reminiscent of certain rejections of what another crowd makes of evolution. There are data there, and they're verifiable with standard, widely-reviewed injunctions and observations.

As for your reliance solely on the Objectivist side of the ontological equation, I can only say that one can still honor/accept the idea of the reality of the subjective experience in it's own right, while still coupling it with it's objective, let's say, "algorithmic" counterpart.

I find both you and Mr. Meece very interesting from my vantage point. Eric is philosophically a radical subjectivist (philosophical Idealist). He's sees the "inner" as the only reality. All objective reality is just a thought, or series of thoughts, in some greater universal mind. He denies the fundamental reality of the objective world, or at least sees it as decidedly secondary.

You, OTOH, are the opposite. You are a radical objectivist (philosophical materialist). The philosophical schools/concepts of epiphenomenalism and eliminativism (between which there is a nuance of difference even if very similar) would make total sense to you. Yours is the more accepted position in the modern world. Wilber has argued (and I endlessly agree) that postmodernism unwittingly retains this ontology and that's why it's so dysfunctional (it's bad enough in modernity, but more developmentally appropriate).

You can't see the subjective as having it's own reality, and Eric has a similar but opposite issue. Wilber says they're BOTH equally valid modes of existence, and indeed, in the larger reality they're coupled whether one likes it or not.

Likewise with the individual-collective polarity. Yes, there is a polarity, but also, yes they are inextricably paired. Where Wilber gets mystical on us is where he says ultimately, all four are one and the same, even if they are also truly different. Yowza. Now that's some tasty "one hand clapping" stuff!

Sean, thanks for putting up with my negations about Mr. Wilber's "integral theory of consciousness." As you probably know, I am suspicious of nearly all forms of New Age phenomenology. They focus too much on "the being" (ontology) and rely too much on subjective nuances (whimology) to satisfy my needs for objective principles and evidence. YES, I am hard-headed in this respect, because I have had too much fluff blown in my face over the years by those who insist that subjectivity is somehow an objective enterprise.

Here is my "principle of discovery": If I don't understand something objectively, then I can't arbitrarily accept a subjective explanation for it. To do so would seem to rely more on hope than on reason. One extreme example: If I don't know what biological life is or where it came from, then I cannot possibly jump to a conclusion that God made it miraculously and put it here on Earth for His own divine purposes.

My gripe with developmental psychology is that it has slopped over into evolutionary biology in the form of "evo devo" (evolutionary development). To me, evo devo proponents, such a Mary Jane West-Eberhard, have misinterpreted the biological evidence. They want to see evolutionary "forces" at work that avoid the principles of homology (inheritance) by somehow skirting around those digitally important genes. Morris's "convergence" does the same thing.

Personally, I think evolution is a function of algorithmic information (genes) playing off analogous information (organismic/environmental interactions). There is no need to include phenomenology; it does not stand up to Occam's razor. And there really is no need to invoke ontology, since "the being" is the same thing AS "consciousness," not a subject on a slab in a lab. And thus we needn't be distracted by what a mirror sees when it reflects upon itself, or by the sound of one hand clapping.

I'll be ready for Wilber's phenomenology when I understand everything important about the raw stuff that can be apprehended objectively. I'm only on the first page of that book, and time's a-wastin'.

Eric Meece might say 'You can't fly with Peter Pan to Never-Never Land UNLESS you believe in Tinker Bell.' I would say instead, 'You can't fly with Peter Pan to Never-Never Land IF you believe in Tinker Bell.' For us, Never-Never Land will be entirely a matter of algorithmic information (digital code) playing off analogous information (operating machines) to attain an electromagnetic/quantum-mechanical post-existence. When we get there, we'll have to check our phenomena, along with our weapons, at the door.

I'm serious about this, but I won't live to see it.

—Croak

Originally Posted by Croakmore

I would say instead, 'You can't fly with Peter Pan to Never-Never Land IF you believe in Tinker Bell.'

You mean that you don't even clap?????

John

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

Originally Posted by Croakmore

I would say instead, 'You can't fly with Peter Pan to Never-Never Land IF you believe in Tinker Bell.'

You mean that you don't even clap?????

John

Well, yes, but only with one hand.

Originally Posted by lexpat

> Well I've always been a little skeptical about turnings outside
> the Anglo-American world. So many of the conflicts in this part of
> the world are tribal or regional. People have been living where
> they are for thousands of years here and really haven't been
> unified in nation states all that long. That may change, however,
> as people continue to sort themselves in other ways.

The fact that the conflicts are tribal or regional doesn't change the
fact that they have to follow the same generational timeline. To
respond to this message, I put together the following Vietnamese
timeline since 1428. This is just a first pass, and there are some
things missing in the 1600s, but it does show the generational
patterns:

1428: Le Loi defeated the Chinese army, thus rescuing the country from
1000 years of Chinese domination, creating the Le dynasty.

1471: The Vietnamese invaded Champa, captured its capital of Vijaya
and massacred thousands of its people, effectively ending the
existence of Champa kingdom.

1545: Nguyen Kim attacks the Le forces, bringing about the
partitioning of Vietnam, with the Nguyen family, professing loyalty to
the Le, controlling the south, and the Trinh family controlling the
north.

(I've lost the thread here, and further study is required. The civil
war between the Le and Mac dynasties comes to an end in 1592, but I
can't discern whether it's a crisis war on the same timeline as
Nguyen / Trinh wars. This requires a more detailed study of the
history of the era.)

1672 Major battles between the Nguyen (south) and Trinh (north)
reached a climax, forcing a truce and a peace treaty. (Not sure if
this is a crisis or non-crisis war.

Other major wars at this time involved the Khmer and the Cham. These
all need to be sorted out.

1771-1790 The Tay-son rebellion, led by three brothers of the Ho
clan, first defeated the Nguyen regime in the south, then defeated
the Trinh in the north, and then defeated an invading Chinese army.
The result was a unified Vietnam for the first time in 200 years.

Awakening: During the 1800s, cultural development blossomed, making
it the high point of literary culture in Vietnamese history. Thanks
to the French, Christianity bloomed, with hundreds of thousands of
Catholic conversions from Confucianism and Buddhism. However, as the
unraveling era arrived (1850s-70s), Ember Tu-Duc relentlessly
suppressed Christianity, sanctioning thousands of executions.

1865-1885 French conquest of Indochina.

Awakening: 1904 Formation of the Duy Tan Hoi revolutionary
(anti-colonial) society. 1908 - student uprising in Hanoi. 1925 Ho
Chi Minh forms the Revolutionary Youth League. (In 1920, Ho had been
in Franch, where he took part in the founding of the French Communist
Party.) During WW II, Ho formed the Viet Minh political / relief
organization, for people starving to death thanks to confiscation of
goods by the occupying Japanese. Numerous anti-colonial uprising from
the 1930s through the 1950s.

1954-74: Human wave assaults defeated a French encampment at
Dien Bien Phu caused French to withdraw. America sent advisors to
Saigon to help the South Vietnamese. The Americans supported the
South Vietnamese through the North-South civil war that finally ended
with the North's victory in 1974.

Originally Posted by lexpat

> In the south, Ho Chi Minh City (official name and the one most
> younger people use), is a place increasingly connected to the
> outside world. There are many many Viet khieu here (overseas
> Viets) - some older ones returning to invest, some younger ones
> returning to discover their heritage. Many of the college age kids
> I teach would like to emigrate. They just see more opportunity
> elsewhere. Are they 'prophets?' Well I think they would very much
> like to be whatever people their age are in America and Europe.

How are the Catholics in Saigon getting on?

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
john@GenerationalDynamics.com
http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

Dear Richard,

Originally Posted by Croakmore

> I'm struggling to comprehend the meme of biological life and how
> it got here, so taking on the meme of "mob psychology" is almost
> too much for me to bear. It has arbitrary properties, I suspect.

I've been reading Hannah Arendt's The Origins of
Totalitarianism. This book is stunning, breathtaking, amazing.

I think you'll like this, Richard. There are no strange attractors
here, no Tinker Bell, and yet Arendt takes you directly to NeverLand.

She shows exactly how it happens. How antisemitism in the 1800s
climaxed in the Dreyfus affair in France, and then became "the
catalytic agent for first, the Nazi movement, then a world war, and
finally the establishment of death factories."

Everything is there, the transformation of the classes to the masses,
and then to the mob behavior that allows individuals in mobs do
things that they would never do without the mob.

This is a big book -- well over 500 pages -- so it's going to take me
a while to deal with it.

Here's an extract of a few paragraphs from the preface:

Originally Posted by Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism,

> Two world wars in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted
> chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty
> for the vanquished and no respite for the victor, have ended in
> the anticipation of a third World War between the two remaining
> world powers. This moment of anticipation is like the calm that
> settles after all hopes have died. We no longer hope for an
> eventual restoration of the old world order with all its
> traditions, or for the reintegration of the masses of five
> continents who have been thrown into a chaos produced by the
> violence of wars and revolutions and the growing decay of all that
> has still been spared. Under the most diverse conditions and
> disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same
> phenomena -- homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness
> to an unprecended depth.

> Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we
> depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to
> follow the rules of common sense and self-interest -- forces that
> look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other
> centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between
> those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything
> is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those
> for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their
> lives.

> On the level of historical insight and political thought there
> prevails an ill-defined, general agreement that the essential
> structure of all civilizations is at the breaking point. Although
> it may seem better preserved in some parts of the world than in
> others, it can nowhere provide the guidance to the possibilities
> of the century, or an adequate response to its horrors. Desperate
> hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the center of such
> events than balanced judgment and measured insight. The central
> events of our time are not less effectively forgotten by those
> committed to a belief in an unavoidable doom, than by those who
> haven themselves up to reckless optimism.

> This book has been written against a background of both reckless
> optimism and reckless despair. It holds that Progress and Doom
> are two sides of the same medal; that both are articles of
> superstitition, not of faith. ...

> We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past
> and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply
> think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in
> oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally
> come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition.
> This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts
> to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a
> still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better
> future, are vain.

> Hannah Arendt, Summer 1950

What's interesting about this passage is that in many ways its tone
is more appropriate to today than to 1950. But this represents the
way people thought in America's grim Austerity era (what Strauss and
Howe call America's "High" era). During this era, which I remember
well enough to confirm these attitudes, there was enormous fear of
another financial cataclysm and of another world war, this time
against Communism.

The important thing was to live life while it was still possible, and
to try desperately to prevent a repeat, a new world war. That's why
1950s women wanted to stay home and hold their children close. Why
work in such a mad world? And that's why America tried to stop the
advance of Communism in Korea and Vietnam.

Today Arendt is gone, but if she were alive today she'd probably be
the same as everyone else -- talking about how George Bush will
either destroy the world or save the world.

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
john@GenerationalDynamics.com
http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

Dear Richard,

Originally Posted by Croakmore

> Would you say that this disturbance in SoCal is evidence
> supporting the “dynamics” of “mob psychology”? I might agree.
> http://my.earthlink.net/article/nat?...327-1574370741

I certainly would. We're seeing this kind of xenophobia increase
around the world, in all the countries that fought in WW II.
Attitudes that were unthinkable ten years ago are commonplace today.

We're seeing the classes of the Mexican community of the southwest
turn into classless masses.

I'm coming to thing of the world "congeals" as the appropriate verb
that describes what's going on. The classless mob will congeal
around a new idea, just as they might otherwise adopt a new fashion
trend or rock star. But when the classless mob congeals around a new
political idea, it will be unexpected.

Arendt characterizes this new idea in a startling way: mob attitudes
and convictions are actually "the attitudes and convictions of the
bourgeoisie cleansed of hypocrisy [p. 334]." Whew, that's brutal!
It's the opposite of political correctness. If you hate the Jews but
still make peace with them, then cleansing of hypocrisy means killing
them. If you believe that the American Southwest should really belong
to Mexico, but you clean Americans' houses anyway, then cleansing of
hypocrisy means taking back the Southwest and making the Americans do
the cleaning.

So we're going to see these classless masses around the world congeal
on new ideas, ideas that are cleansed of hypocrisy, where the
hyprocrisy is that if you hate someone then you should do something
about it, even kill him.

Originally Posted by Croakmore

> What bothers me, though, is how to convincingly measure the
> “energy” in your alleged “mob psychology” concept. In a
> catastrophe theory context you could say that some kind of a wave
> function collapses from its endogenous energy buildup. Any
> thoughts?
> http://www.exploratorium.edu/complex...tastrophe.html

I read through the material on Catastrophe Theory. When the stock
market crashes, is that a "catastrophe" in the same sense as
Catastrophe Theory? I don't know, and I'll have to think about it.

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
john@GenerationalDynamics.com
http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

John, my take on catastrophe theory is something like a model of a landscape the folds over on itself. Surf waves would be a practical example. A wave function moves forward in time, gathering energy, but eventually collaspes as critical parameters go out of equilibrium with each other. The "energy" growing in the immigration "wave" could be economic disequilibrium. Personally, I don't think the immigration wave has yet collapsed on the Amerikan shoreline. But Cinco de Mayo might really get the surf up in SoCal.

Originally Posted by Croakmore

John, my take on catastrophe theory is something like a model of a landscape the folds over on itself. Surf waves would be a practical example. A wave function moves forward in time, gathering energy, but eventually collaspes as critical parameters go out of equilibrium with each other. The "energy" growing in the immigration "wave" could be economic disequilibrium. Personally, I don't think the immigration wave has yet collapsed on the Amerikan shoreline. But Cinco de Mayo might really get the surf up in SoCal.

That's an incredibly interesting speculation, and certainly something that a lot of people
-- including me -- will be watching. It's just four weeks off, isn't it?

John

Their congealing should shock Boomers into 4T ruthless mode.

Originally Posted by Tim Walker

Their congealing should shock Boomers into 4T ruthless mode.

A Latino friend that I work with just told me that:

(a) Cinco de Mayo doesn't mean that much to Mexicans. He said it
was more important to Americans (whatever that means).

(b) He doesn't expect to see more than a parade.

We'll see how good his judgment is.

John

Say, aren't nearly all of these Mexicans immigrants Catholic? Maybe the Catholic church is behind this surge of Latino immigration as a ways-and-means project to help it recover from the costs of priestly pedophilia.

Originally Posted by Zarathustra

Take, e.g., a severe crisis. All other things being equal (and in traditional societies that tended to be the case) this would exogenously create emphasis on the objective and communal -- outside world focus and safety in numbers.

Not necessarily. One could act subjectively and individually. For example in a severe famine or plague the response could be inner-directed (religious) such as the flagellants, or outer-directed such as Wat Tyler's rebellion. Some kinds of crises, like an enemy invasion, require a particular kind of response (outer-directed organized opposition) if the response is to be effective. In general, the kind of response is a matter of choice. As an example in my saeculum report I compare the mid and late 16th century social moments, both of which dealt with the same endogenous crisis: increasing economic insecurity in a changing world overrun with religious conflict. The societal responses were quite different, making one social moment an Awakening and the other a Crisis.

However, there are two other fundamental aspects (faces or sides to the human holon) that by definition cannot be ignored. This tension will automatically work to bring the crisis emphasis back into a more psychologically healthy equilibrium, and do so endogenously.

I don't see here where the tension is. What exactly is pulling on what? What is a side of the human holon. What is a human holon?

I suspect what started the saeculum is an intitial perturbation that sent this ontological balance off kilter. Then the natural tendency to put things back in balance would overshoot at first (pent up momentum overcoming intertia) but unless something else interferes, equilibrium (or something close to it) would eventually be achieved.

Here you appear to be using a spring and weight analogy (or a pendulum). This will definitely generate ossiliation. It is not clear to be what is the spring and what is the mass. What corresponds to the force constant of the srping and how is the period of oscillation determined?

I employ a hystereis approach, introducing a time lag into a standard negative feedback loop like a thermostat. The time lag is directly related to human development, it is the time between birth and physcial adulthood in one model or the time between developing a world view in young adulthood and in using that worldview in the exercive of power in elderhood.

Originally Posted by Mike Alexander '59

Originally Posted by Zarathustra

However, there are two other fundamental aspects (faces or sides to the human holon) that by definition cannot be ignored. This tension will automatically work to bring the crisis emphasis back into a more psychologically healthy equilibrium, and do so endogenously.

I don't see here where the tension is. What exactly is pulling on what? What is a side of the human holon. What is a human holon?

A holon is the infrastructure of an ontological event. It occurs geometrically in an existential moment, and it is shaped like a tetrahedron. It has four faces, each with three edges, so its tension manifests on a base-12 event horizon. The holon has trans-contextual meaning. For example, both the twelve signs of the zodiac and the twelve measure formulae of physics can be aligned congruently on the same holon. The holon accounts for all ontological moments (at least in my froggie hypothesis).

When Eric Meece gets out his astrological signs (Cancer, Aries, Scorpio, Leo, etc.) , and when Richard Emery gets out his measure formulae (e.g., velocity = L/T, acceleration = L/T^2, momentum = ML/T, force = ML/T^2, etc.), they are attempting to do the same thing — apprehend the ontological holon.

—Croakmore

Stock markets melting down

To all:

I'm currently in the process of writing an article for my web site on
the state of the world markets.

I'm trying to decide how strong a statement I want to make, and I'll
probably soften what I plan to say here. I'll see how I feel
tomorrow.

But after this week, I now feel that the probability is greater than
50% that we've entered the downward roll into a major financial
crisis / stock market crash.

The big question is: Where has all the money gone?

I've been preparing graphs all evening. Let's take a look at some of
them:



On May 10, the Dow reached 11642.65, and appeared to be within reach
of the all-time high of 11723 that it reached on January 14, 2000.
Instead, it fell 5% to 11128 on Thursday, before recovering slightly
on Friday.

Incredibly, this collapse appears to have caught most Wall Street
investors by surprise, even though people like me, as well as other
people in this forum and a few well-known analysts in the industry
have been warning of a "major correction" that's due.

The major feature of last week's collapse is that it didn't just
happen on Wall Street, but occurred in markets around the world.

Here's the graph for the Toronto Stock Exchange:



The Bombay Sensex stock exchange was recently celebrating reaching
12,000 very rapidly.
http://www.generationaldynamics.com/...060421#e060421

There was talk of a "bubble," but it was dismissed by most investors.

But look at the Sensex today:



It's been melting down also, in the same time frame as the Dow.

The Tokyo Nikkei is a bellwether for Asian stocks, and it's also been
falling:



Other Asian stocks have been falling just as dramatically.

The Nikkei has always been a bit of a puzzle to me, because they
suffered an enormous crash in 1990:



It's now been 16 years since that crash, and I would have thought
that they would have recovered by now, but apparently they've been
caught up in the new bubble of the last few years as well.

It's not just stocks that have been falling in price, but so have
oil, copper, and other commodities. Take a look at gold prices:



The various "gold bugs" have been predicting that gold would continue
through the roof as the dollar collapses, a claim that I've always
found dubious, even in the face of a crash.

As I've discussed many times before, we're actually in the midst of a
long term deflationary period, and if that's right, then the dollar
will be getting stronger rather than collapsing. That's what
happened in the 1930s depression.

However, things are very different today. We're a debtor nation
rather than a creditor nation, as we were at that time.

Furthermore, other countries, led by Japan and China, own hundreds of
billions of dollars in long-term American bonds, which might be
dumped on the market. There's no way to predict what effect this
will have. On the one hand it might cause a dollar collapse; but on
the other hand the Fed may be able to get way with postponing
redemption of long-term bonds, effectively taking them out of the
picture.

So what happens now? In the last week, markets all over the world
have fallen 2-6%, and the underlying fundamentals haven't changed --
the enormous American debt, the increasing instability of China, the
fact that the Gaza Strip is very close to civil war, the unraveling
of global carry trade and hedge fund positions as Japan moves to
abandon its "zero interest rate" policy, the end (last October) of the
housing bubble, and so forth.

People in this forum who know me know that since 2002 I've been
predicting a stock market crash to the 3000-4000 range, probably by
2006 or 2007. But that prediction has always "felt" far off -- until
this year.

This year, my "feeling" is that the world economy has been getting
increasingly unstable, with an interlocking "pyramid scheme" bubble
that's close to collapsing.

And this brings me to the point of why I "feel" that the time is
here. With money being pulled out of all these markets,
simultaneously, it's no longer a question of investors moving money
from one market to another.

Instead, investors appear to be completely unraveling their
positions, and taking profits before things get worse. This will
cause the pyramid to collapse.

Somewhere I read that every investor is watching for a crash, and
every investor plans to get out "before midnight," so that he won't
lose money. What it looks like to me is that the first investors are
getting out, because they feel that "midnight" is very close, and
that's my feeling to.

Investors have been getting increasingly risk-aversive anyway, and
now with money being pulled out of all the markets at the same time,
there's little chance that we'll again see enough "irrational
exuberance" to push the markets back to their previous highs, in my
opinion.

However, I'm hesitating because there's one thing that's missing, and
it's a big thing. There hasn't been a great big, old fashioned
investor panic, where everyone tries to sell at the same time and
market falls 20%.

It's impossible to predict the date of a panic before it happens, but
I've been saying on my web site for the last 3-4 months that the
conditions for a panic seem right. After this past week, they're
even more so.

So for any investors on this forum who were also planning to get out
"before midnight," I would strongly urge you to do so now.

Despite the various arguments and such on this forum, I feel that
I've made a number of friends. I hope that all of you come out ok.

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com