Quid est Veritas?
Embedded in articles such as this, and in more convincing ones to be sure, authors fail or succeed in spinning, wonderful and convincing hypotheses that attract a further ‘cluster bias’ beyond the author which is difficult to resist. The ‘strange attractor’ of logical ‘acceptability’ generates its own waves, which reach far beyond the authors intent and/or intention.
Complexity is a fluid dynamic field that generates its own eddies and currents generating waves and with enough energy hurricanes. The energetic status of any model is paramount, and this is equivalent to ‘clustering’ on a social level, this clustering is generated simply by the energetic drives of an individuals fear and/or desire and the fuel is often (my own cluster bias may be evident here) ideology, which includes our ‘knowledge’ systems, which are never pure, they are always ‘contaminated’ by the weight of adherents, something modern science still struggles with. The build up of excess energy in one area will cause an imbalance which nature tends to equalize, usually in a catastrophic manner which is the fastest and most chaotic way to assuage the imbalance. The root median that tends to hold this ‘catastrophe’ at bay in social organization is language, and here is our very modern problem, the inability to establish any truth or veracity in our knowledge base.
We are the recipients of very technical terms which we ‘think’ we understand, so we move on carrying our often deficient conceptions with us as memes to further ‘understanding’, this weight of ‘information’ in equal distribution with ‘miss-information’ is our very modern problem, it engenders our (what I like to call) ‘formation-ism’. The collapse of certainty energizes a search for safety and this feeds the fear complex that manifests ideology as a vicious circle and this, in my opinion, is a thought that should be on any authors mind who seeks to ‘convince’ - don’t stop doing it by any means but be aware thoughts have great consequence, and they have a life of their own.
At the moment ‘Global Thermonuclear War’ is one such ‘fear’ generator (after a hiatus of safety behind the believed ‘wall’ - which broke both ways - of ‘strength’), the meaning of which is shrouded by the ‘unthinkable’. Such stark terror paralyzes ‘thinking’ producing a neurotic ‘complex that spins words as descriptors with little relation to the central trauma, because, literally it is ‘unthinkable'. Comfort seekers will argue it is ‘survivable’ given enough strength, pessimists will sell their soul to the devil to avoid such a terror and in the middle, the traumatized ‘public’ will grab at any life boat they can to stop themselves drowning in this ‘energetic sea’.
If we throw ‘lifeboats’ into this 'energetic sea' we had better provide them with ‘safe havens’ , but what usually happens is we fill the lifeboat with more chaos which seeks to merge with the very sea from which it originated - the skin of protection (the hull) becomes irrelevant as it slips beneath the waves of further chaotic thinking, which is our lot in this ‘formation-ism’ state that circularly engenders further energetic catastrophe. Quid est veritas? Maybe more valid today than in the mouth of a ‘fictionalized’ Roman governor 2000 odd years ago, and thereby hangs a tale…
