Dispatches from Deena Stryker
While US lawmakers twist and turn in their sleep, dreading the sound of the alarm clock announcing another day trying to figure out how to survive their association with the new president, or, in the case of Democrats, how to impeach him, Californians are responding to the deportation of illegal aliens by calling for Calexit, Califrexit or Caleavefornia. They may be inspired by the 1975 book by Ernest Callenbach, a Pennsylvania writer who migrated to California and eventually published “Ecotopia”, an imaginary country born when California, Oregon and Washington succeeded from the US. The reasons for that fictitious succession were mainly ecological, while the one called for today is a response to the Trump presidency as a whole. As the election results came in, Uber investor Shervin Pishevar tweeted that he would fund a “legitimate campaign for California to become its own nation”. That plan is gaining traction especially due to indignation over the president’s plan to stop illegal immigration through US southern borders.
As Republican lawmakers face angry crowds across the US during the Congressional break, mainly over the coming replacement of Obamacare, on the other side of the world, European leaders are wrestling with a momentous choice: should they take money from social programs to fund a military that is being asked to threaten their Russian neighbor, or might they finally dare to break with seventy years of ‘benevolent’ oversight and declare for a common Eurasian home?
Going back to 1972, an organization called The Club of Rome gathered about a hundred thinkers and researchers from around the world to identify major issues that needed to be considered together in order to be resolved. Ahead of their time, these people understood that the problems of food, population, pollution, resources, and weapons of mass destruction could not be dealt with separately, but only by studying their interactions based on the new science of systems analysis.
The first Report to the Club of Rome, Dennis and Donella Meadows’ The Limits to Growth, landed like a bombshell in the capitals of the Western world only to be swiftly ejected by the media under the derogatory label of a “doomsday approach.” Subsequent research teams funded by the Club of Rome each took a different approach to what they called ‘the problématique’, however their reports had less of an impact than the first, probably because in the seventies and eighties, nothing could match the threat of potential annihilation inherent in the U.S.-Soviet antagonism.
With the presumed end of the East/West conflict, the nuclear threat receded; however it continues to loom in Iran’s determination to harness nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, as well as in North Korea’s insistence on arming itself against perceived threats from the United States — not to mention NATO’s move up to the very borders of the former Soviet Union. Instead of uniting with Russia to defeat ISIS, the West is disintegrating from within. To better understand what is happening, it may be useful to reconnect to the Club of Rome’s reports that consider the earth as a system, in which, by definition, the modification of one part modifies the whole.
Systems are born from chaos, and counter-intuitively, ‘order’ is not static but dynamic, while ‘disorder’ is static. Energy inputs into a system organize molecules, creating what physicists call ‘order. Lack of energy, on the other hand, eventually results in a state of “equilibrium” or “entropy,” which physicists call “disorder.” The ever-changing relationship between the two is a delicate balancing whose ideal state is ‘just far enough from equilibrium’. When a rush of energy pushes it ‘too far from equilibrium’, the system ‘dissipates’, either creating new order or life, or breaking down, depending on previous history. Any number of factors can cause that flow to increase, creating runaway instability; and while a certain amount of instability is necessary for things to happen, too much of it takes the system so far from equilibrium that it eventually reaches a threshold known as a bifurcation point.
Instead of uniting with Russia to defeat ISIS, the West is disintegrating from within. To better understand what is happening, it may be useful to reconnect to the Club of Rome’s reports that consider the earth as a system, in which, by definition, the modification of one part modifies the whole.
Ideally, as the Taoists intuited in the 6th century B.C., with Yin and Yang, the flow of energy through a system keeps it ‘just far enough’ from equilibrium to avoid entropy — or death. If it communicates with its environment, from which it obtains energy and into which it rejects waste, it is known as an open system. If not, it is a closed system. Political systems include human, geographic, historical and cultural elements, and most often, they are “closed,” in that the many are largely kept outside the deliberations of the few. Dictatorship, which seeks to maintain a status quo (or in scientific terms, ‘equilibrium,’) inevitably leads to its own death, with revolution opening the system to the many that have been kept outside it.
Most revolutions can be seen as catalysts that turn a state of extreme order into one of extreme disorder, while most disintegrations of empire result from the entropy to which extreme order leads. Ideally, a system should oscillate between the two. The French philosopher François Jullien, who coined the notion of “the way things are”, likens counter-balancing to the middle ground, or wisdom, of Taoism or Confucianism. If we apply to politics the intuitive notion that counter-balancing is the ongoing reconciliation of seeming opposites, we find that when lack of information-processing causes a political system to tend toward immobility, an extreme of left or right such as Donald Trump, kickstart it again. The number of crises provoked by Trump’s election suggest he fits the chemical definition of a catalyst: “An element that has the ability to provoke change.” As clarified by biologist Stuart Kauffman in At Home in the Universe:
When the number of different kinds of molecules in a chemical soup passes a certain threshold, a self-sustaining network of reactions will suddenly appear. Not because of a mysterious élan vital, but thanks to the simple, profound transformation of dead molecules into an organization by which each molecule’s formation is catalyzed by some other molecule in the organization. Given a supply of ‘food’ molecules, the network will be able to recreate itself indefinitely. Like the metabolic networks that inhabit every living cell, it will be alive….Life, at its root, lies in the property of catalytic closure among a collection of molecular species. Alone, each molecular species is dead. Jointly, once catalytic closure is achieved, the collective system of molecules is alive.
As I further quote Kauffman in A Taoist Politics: “Molecule A and molecule B, when left alone, will eventually catalyze to form molecule C. However, if A and B find themselves in the presence of D, which acts as a catalyst, then they will form molecule C much faster. In turn, A, B, and C may catalyze other reactions. This is known as a collectively auto-catalytic system, in which molecules speed up the very reactions by which they themselves are formed.” If this sounds like what is going on with the Trump presidency, it’s no surprise, if one considers the world as a system. Indeed, rapidity is a favorite modus operandi of Trump’s special advisor, Steve Bannon, a much-read member of the alt-right who also admires Lenin.
Bannon’s right wing mystique has already been interpreted as a license to desecrate Jewish grave sites in St. Louis; the planned revamping of the health-care systems has sparked public meetings as noisy as those organized by the Tea Party over Obamacare. Meanwhile, immigrants who may have crossed our border years ago to become productive citizens worry about being deported, while Syrians fleeing the civil war Trump’s predecessor underwrote struggle to understand why they are barred from seeking safety as the nation’s latest huddled masses.
None of this, of course, is adequately debated in the press, but Trump’s victory has also acted as a catalyst to the left’s decades-long but feeble efforts to show that the idea of a free press is an illusion. Indifferent as to whether ‘the democratic process’ was hacked by cyberspace equivalents of Vladimir Putin’s ‘little green men’, Republican voters see the taunts their candidate receives from the fourth estate and suddenly realize the left’s criticism was valid. The question is whether a left-leaning alternative press can benefit from that revelation.
DEENA STRYKER, Senior Contributing Editor
Born in Philadelphia, Stryker spent most of her adolescent and adult years in Europe, resulting over time in several unique books, her latest being
CUBA: Diary of a Revolution, Inside the Cuban Revolution with Fidel, Raul, Che, and Celia Sanchez
America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World
A Taoist Politics: The Case For Sacredness
She began her journalistic career at the French News Agency in Rome, spent two years in Cuba finding out whether the Barbados were Communists before they made the revolution (‘Cuba 1964: When the Revolution was Young’). After spending half a decade in Eastern Europe, and a decade in the U.S., studying Global Survival and writing speeches in the Carter State Department, she wrote the only book that foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall AND the dissolution of the Soviet Union (“Une autre Europe, un autre Monde’). Her memoir, ‘Lunch with Fellini, Dinner with Fidel’, tells it all. ‘A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness’, which examines the similarities between ancient wisdom and modern science and what this implies for political activism; and ‘America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World” is a pamphlet about how the U.S. came down from the City on a Hill’.
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