Pacifism and other steadfast principles

A friend sent me this article on "A Quaker in the Military". I really like the article. He has a clear expression of his models and thoughts on the matter. And it got me to thinking about the principle of pacifism and other such principles. There is the rationalist's dilemma about when is it right not to be pacific, i.e., if one can stop violence or harm to another, should one not step  in and do what it takes? Very confusing at that level of thinking. So I escalated the thinking to the next level of abstraction to see if I could find a way out of this dilemma.


There is a saying in NLP that Every behaviour is appropriate in some context. Then there is the example of "reality". Even what we consider as the "fundamental forces" of nature break down in certain contexts and / or combine to become a different / unified force. So, when we make up principles that we want to hold in all contexts, e.g., non-violence, we are in direct contradiction with the nature of  this particular universe. And is that why we encounter the "dilemma" at a particular level of thinking? Being one with the Way, is there no dilemma there? One adjusts to the context and does what the context requires? Does this presume a certain level of thinking / development?


Another issue in the article is the intentional direction to improve different societies and situations. It seems to me that there is something else going on in that context. We have spent billions / trillions across the world. And in many cases made the situation worse by these attempts at control and management. For example, the elimination of Allende in Chile, the support of sociopathic dictators in various countries. Seems to me that the underlying ontologies in the command and control attempts are rather fundamentally flawed. The people doing these interventions may have the best of intentions or be caught up in institutional forces. And the results of these actions seem to me to be in the large rather detrimental. So, I see these new proposals of "now we are doing the right thing, we have learned our lessons" as being more of the same. The place of being / spirit that generate these command and control systems are part or the whole of the problem. And I think that is in part my objection to some of Barnett's perspectives in the Pentagon's new map.

Ecology of Mind Article and Thoughts on it

A friend sent me this article on "Ecology of Mind". I found the article to be in a similar vein to a number of thoughts / articles floating around on the web. I found something disquieting about the article as it seemed to be  missing a "completion" of perspective. Here are my thoughts on the matter:

I liked  their articulations and pattern consolidation - infodiversity, erosion of empathy, fragmentation, ...  There are a number  of threads along these lines  on the web and in conversations. While what they are saying makes sense from within a certain perspective, it leaves out the meta context and its interpretation. And of course that interpretation is dependent on one's base ontology, which is often invisible to the articulator or designed to be so in the interest of telling a particular story / articulating a perspective.

We have a feature to hold on to the familiar. When that familiar is changing (rather rapidly), then we are at a loss in a very direct sense in many dimensions. We don't yet have a new robust ontology to maneuver this complexity. And our ontologies are often grounded in the experience path we have taken through life than anything absolute or real.

That said, my take on what is happening is that we are in the midst of a shift akin to the cambrian explosion. Most life forms did not survive that shift. And I expect a number of life forms went extinct (that could have been quite viable) simply by being at the wrong place at the wrong time or being not quite ready for the degree of shift that happened or by the swing of the dragon's tail as it died. The swish of the dragon tail is what I expect we are about to experience. I am not sure how many of us will make it. My sense is also that a good proportion of the human population is not viable in the new context that is being created.

Another aspect of the situation is that we are in a situation of great imbalance. Finding healthy ways of being, integrating these new contexts that are arising into  our lives in healthful ways is a process that is very much in flux.  There are no crystal clear directions or examples that I can see of these integrations yet. There are samples / models here and there of people who are using various aspects of the emerging contexts in healthy ways. In such turmoil, it is easily to lose track of what, how and why we are doing what we are doing. Addictions, information/internet/gadget/porn/drugs/... are imbalances - too much or too little of what is necessary for a healthy modality. Life on the  edge of chaos - we are always on the edge of falling over as when riding a bike. And sometimes we don't realize we have fallen over since the effect is delayed in time.

Another issue with the article is that there is a decidedly negative interpretation of the current context. For example, the erosion of empathy. We have been watching (via netflix) an HBO series called Rome where  they try to depict what day to day life was like in Rome around the time of Julius Caesar. There is certainly a lack of empathy there for slaves and conquered peoples depicted there. I also recall from my early childhood growing up in a culture with servants the attitudes towards servants were definitely not very empathic. I  expect the same was true here for blacks and other minorities. "Empathy" is a feature that is not always present and has not always been present in human history / development. What the current context is doing is bringing out "diff"s between our articulated story of who and what we are with the reality of who and what we "really" are in much more direct and stark contrast with the diff color coded and in bold. However, the nature of how the diff is done is with what we are experiencing / is happening now rather than a balanced diff across the base architecture versus the present instance only.

So, there are a lot of things that are problematic in our current context. In addition, those problems are much larger than they have ever been in our history simply due to the level of development we are at. We are impacting the planet and all other life forms on it in a much more direct way than we have ever been able to do before. My sense is that we do have enough intelligence available to find a path through this in an "optimal scenario" kind of way. However, I  also sense that that is very unlikely. What is far more likely is that the new cambrian explosion will happen with its concomitant extinction of the "old". What emerges may well wonder about what went before and why those that went before did not take the "optimal" path that will be so obvious in hindsight but is shrouded in mists for us now.