Obsessed, Moi?

Big debate on WDN co-learners newgroup today about hierarchy. Some heavy duty emails flying to and fro; here is one of the larger lumps filtered out for your delectation:

“Our brains appear to derive the set of possible meanings from recursion of that dichotomy where that act gives us a power law pattern, a spectrum of qualities from our working off habits/instincts to our excesses in mediation/representation dynamics - IOW from LOCAL, VAGUE, flux dynamics, to UNIVERSAL, CRISP, control dynamics. It is from the realm of differentiating that we get the hierarchy where the support mechanisms develop to aid the 'top' of the system. From a social perspective, the benefit of the hierarchy is in the precision possible in mediation/representation dynamics - at times being OVER precise in that the realm of differentiating, by it nature, FORCES the pushing away of others to assert SELF.”

This reminds me, I must write to Humphrey Lyttleton about a new radio game for him, working title “WotTheBluddyEllsEOnabaht” where a long description of a commonplace object in different styles of jargon is run past the panel, and the first member to guess what is being described gets a bonus point.

For what it’s worth, my view is that we have inherited an hierarchical social structure from our primate ancestors, and that we need democratic feedback structures to provide negative (and positive) feedback to curb the excesses and deviations that occur in the brain functioning of alpha males (and I include the likes of Mrs Thatcher in this term) if they are allowed to function unopposed for more than a couple of weeks.

Which is why it is so important that we all protest against Bush’s scandalous and unremarked 2/11 assault on democracy - OK, OK, I’ll give it a rest just for today.

Obsessed, Moi?