1: Introduction to Pluralism

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Introduction to Pluralism 

            More information is being produced, shared and stored than ever before. Information is rising up, lifting out of direct experience, rising from every area of human activity, every person, every place. The means of producing creative expression are rapidly becoming accessible to ever more of the global population. We are now sharing information locally and spreading it translocally through a multitude of means. The internet has created a globally accessible container, allowing for informational representations to extend beyond former parameters of space and time, beyond the realm of direct experience to interact and relate in their own transcendent ecosystem. This is old news.

            Every object, every observed phenomenon, now carries along with it its historic inheritance of every way that humans have sought to understand it, all the ways we have interacted with it. As such, it horizontalizes all branches of study, all creative interactions, all personal experience- pooling the entire legacy of all cultural objects, information and its representation into a wide and vast ocean of all that is.

            Language, sensory input, information- these are dimension-exploring devices. They construct and compose our very idea of what the world is, how it works, what is possible. At this historical moment we stand confronted with the sheer volume of this information, its diversity and complexity. It encompasses the globe. 

            Some are trying to manage the enormity of this planetary coalescence by working towards a totalizing system of order- communism, a global government, international law. Some are turning toward the local, focusing on community resilience, working in collective farms, trying to live in self-sustaining communes. Some are addressing mid-range structures of power, lobbying governments to improve and continue social programs, give teeth to human rights law, organizing against transnational corporations and their many ploys to desecrate the environment, poison our food, profit from war, avoid all accountability and generally continue functioning within the internal logic of a shamefully myopic profit-driven industrial growth model.

            We can stand from a vantage point that allows for us to see how all  of these types of human activity and more are happening at once. All of these responses to our idea of what the world is, what is possible and how we can participate; they are all occurring simultaneously. And when we expand our scope, stretching our capacity to include all that is, our lens necessarily becomes Pluralist. Precisely because it is inclusive of all observable activity. Instead of actively attempting to impose one system or ideology onto what we observe, we can be receptive. Receptive enough to see the multiplicity of systems that come from people believing and working to bring to bear their interpretations of diverse ideologies which interact- weaving and relating, forming the texture, the topography of what is. Pluralism is a container for this process, enabling us to see how this great multiplicity can co-exist, and how it does so in a way that is continuously evolving through time. Pluralism is a dynamic framework capable of holding and allowing for the pace of change while encouraging the possibility for novel developments. 

2: Pluralism in Practice

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Pluralism in Practice

Scholars the world over are in the process of applying Pluralist thinking to different areas of the social world. In terms of government, Peter Somerville put forward the idea that government no longer has a monopoly on power. Instead, we can now see how social circumstances are created at the intersection of governments, markets, media, organizations, and individuals. Practically speaking, change is not brought about exclusively by government, although the goal might be nested within the realm of government. The change occurs through a complex, multifaceted process, which includes government, just as it also almost always includes markets, media, organizations and individuals.

            A lot of what activists are currently working for  does not lie within the  realm of government’s power, and certainly is not solely attainable through government. Individuals and organizations find themselves striving to bring about general shifts in consciousness or working on areas as complicated and nebulous as the global financial system. In many areas, government may not be the most effective way to bring about the desired change. OR, in practice, it may be more strategic to coordinate with governments from a position within markets, media, organizations and as an individual. If we acknowledge that circumstances and social systems are created at the intersection of governments, companies, media, organizations and individuals, then we can understand how large scale social change happens through people working in all of these areas, through all these different channels, at once.

            In terms of global economies, previous economic social theorists have said that we are living in a Global Capitalist System. Though some nation-states may have slightly different models, they still participate and engage in Capitalist structures for the goods and services that sustain them. How few rogue states there are is a testament to how difficult it is to go against the global norm. Often, when nation-states do, they are commonly jocking for a more advantageous position within the system, not genuinely transcending it. Even nation-states who begin with revolutionary ideals end up playing this way out of perceived necessity. This view sees that we are all encased in this Global Capitalist System and, at this point, there is no way out.

            J.K. Gibson-Graham, in their book on Queering the Economy, forwarded the idea that what is actually going on is a kind of Heterogeneous Capitalism. If one pulls back the hard case label of Capitalism, one  can see there is actually a multiplicity of economic exchanges and systems going on. There are socialist institutions, communes, black markets, care economies, gift economies. There are even groups that do use capitalist structures as a way to transmit life-sustaining values, create fair chains of production or bring people together in community. Gibson-Graham evoke what they call  ‘a theory of possibilities’, a way of seeing what resources one does have and what one is able to do. In this way, starting from present circumstances, we can find fertile areas of possibility to begin taking action. They feel that one of the most productive kinds of action we can take is to create spaces for people to come together. Whether physical or virtual, it is through a space for ‘being in common’ that we gain the potential to generate and support novel innovation. It is through spaces of being in common that alternative economic exchange systems can inoculate and grow inside the organismic whole. This is a dynamic vision of change, a process starting from present circumstances, shifting the infrastructure of survival from within the container of a heterogeneous capitalism.

            In terms of the very process of how things come into being, Michelle Callon and Bruno LaTour originally crafted Actor Network Theory in order to tell the history of data. They felt that all cultural objects, like skyscrapers and scientific facts, are the result of innumerable living and non-living actants involved in micro-processes of relationship and interaction. There is a story that describes and explains why things come to exist in the way that they do. LaTour and Callon wanted to break up linear telling of history, traditionally told from limited points of view as cause and effect- where one event occurs drawing an arrow to the next event and so on. They showed how an arrow pointing in one direction is also pointing in the direction it came from. In Actor Network Theory all arrows are pointing from all elements to all elements at all times. An awareness similar to what Buddhist scholars call pratītyasamutpāda, meaning inter-dependant co-arising.

            Detailing the Actor Network in an exercise in complexity, a thought experiment to consider and include all of the living and non-living entities that enable, support and influence the way that something comes to be in the social world. To try to understand a single social formation, this perspective includes things like opposing groups, the building a club uses for their meet ups and the media used in promotions as all part of the extended network because they have a role in influencing the behavior of that group. This view allows us to understand that a single social formation exists within an ecology of people, nature and technology, which all contribute locally and non-locally to the expression of each. Actor Network Theory is an exercise in fully considering all the factors that impact the reason why a particular social formation comes into being as well as seeing the full landscape of which it is a part.

            In all of these cases, Pluralist thought is a cognitive tool, an ontological step revealing the interconnected nature of existence. This Pluralist view does not erase difference. It is not intended to gloss over the structural dynamics of power or underestimate the fear and anger that rise up in response to the forces we face. The darkness is great, the pain very real, the stakes high. We are being called to action. The task before us is nothing less then transforming the way that we live with each other and the planet. We are being called to bring about true social justice, an internal and external peace unheard of in recorded human history. We are being called to bring about an environmental relationship drastically different then that which now enables our survival. The information indicates that time is running out. This is our narrowing window of opportunity to see the intricate and inextricable interexistance between the social and the environmental worlds, and to work for that totality, to work for a Global Justice.

3: The Geometry of Pluralism

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The Geometry of Pluralism

Romanesco, Broccoli 

         In all of these cases, Pluralist thought is a cognitive tool, an ontological step revealing the interconnected nature of existence. This Pluralist view does not erase difference. It is not intended to gloss over the structural dynamics of power or underestimate the fear and anger that rise up in response to the forces we face. The darkness is great, the pain very real, the stakes high. We are being called to action. The task before us is nothing less then transforming the way that we live with each other and the planet. We are being called to bring about true social justice, an internal and external peace unheard of in recorded human history. We are being called to bring about an environmental relationship drastically different then that which now enables our survival. The information indicates that time is running out. This is our narrowing window of opportunity to see the intricate and inextricable interexistance between the social and the environmental worlds, and to work for that totality, to work for a Global Justice.

            Because this is our current challenge, what we need is a clear model of how social change actually happens. So that we can be strategic with our efforts. So we can contextualize and co-ordinate our good work. So we can become lucid in this movement and step into empowered choice- choosing our tools, allies and campaigns from a place of conscious passion. So we can identify our true opposition and find greater acceptance in our co-existence with others. So that maybe we can come to love each other more, because maybe that is the only real chance we have at pulling this one out.

            Stepping into pluralist thought, expanding the peripheral vision to include ever more, seeing past closed categories to the larger, underlying territory. Gazing out at this vast ocean of what is- there is so much. The area is wide and deep, the raw expansiveness of it intuitively calls for a way to structure  the space. Turning towards geometry, the science and architecture of space, our mathematical language for navigating its expanses. Seeking an appropriate form, a descriptive principle. Pulling apart the scales, mapping out the emerging patterns. They come, building like wave out of wave. The contours of this pattern are far too complex to be described by traditional Euclidian geometry. And, remarkably, the self-propagating, self-generating, self-organizing scales of what is seem to follow the principles of a fractal.

            Fractals are self-similar patterns where smaller and larger iterations form the same pattern on different scales. Fractals are everywhere in nature: lungs, river networks, tides. A classic example is how a tree follows a primary branching pattern. Its trunk reaches out to its larger branches, those branches then reach out into smaller branches in a form that follows the original pattern. Smaller branches then extend into leaves, whose spine is like a tree trunk reaching out with larger ribs that then branch out into smaller phytocellular branches and so on. These patterns repeating on different scales are everywhere in nature. The smaller pattern not only follows the form of the larger, but also experiences itself as an autonomous entity. An example of this is coral. Coral is made from polips. Those polips are part of the larger coral organism, functioning as one. Yet, simultaneously scientists have recently become aware that each individual polyp is having it own polyp experience. You can also think about how a brain cell looks like the projected image of the universe, how planets orbit the sun similar to how protons and neurons orbit an electron, or the way the whole planet behaves like a single living organism. The example of the tree branching pattern is a simple spatial fractal. An example of a time-space fractal would be something more like the carbon cycle- where beings exchange carbon for oxygen at varying levels of coordination simultaneously. A single animal exhales the carbon a tree inhales while the algae in the ocean inhale the carbon off-gassing from industrial production while the hooves of grazing animals turn up the oxygen in the soil and deposits carbon there all occuring on different scales in innumerable interactions all at the same time.

            Applying this principle, I have developed a model of the machinations of social change and a vision of Global Justice that I call Fractal Pluralism. Fractal Pluralism brings a fractal understanding to a pluralist conception of social change. Fractal Pluralism is a model,  a way of spatially visualizing the intricate interconnection of the full spectrum of activities being undertaken by people to bring about a life sustaining culture on this planet. It is a form of scalar play, collapsing the dichotomy between local and global to show the complex layering and the multi-scalarity of human organizing. As a model in action, it is geared towards finding tactical alliances on all scales. This does not mean that everyone is on the team. The opposition is real and a distraction;destruction and disengagement are ever present. This model is a tool for visionary activists to conceptualize their position in the pluralist process towards Global Justice. It is a re-imagining of networks, intended to move us towards the goal of discerning which relationships are useful to articulate, including markets, governments, non-governmental organizations, spiritual communities and whomever else one wants to include, honor and celebrate as doing the work to bring about Global Justice.

4: Introducing Fractal Pluralism, Space and Scale

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Introducing Fractal Pluralism: Space and Scale

    Applying these principles, I have developed a model of the machinations of social change and a vision of Global Justice that I call Fractal Pluralism. Fractal Pluralism brings a fractal understanding to a pluralist conception of social change. Fractal Pluralism is a model,  a way of spatially visualizing the intricate interconnection of the full spectrum of activities being undertaken by people to bring about a life sustaining culture on this planet. It is a form of scalar play, collapsing the dichotomy between local and global to show the complex layering and the multi-scalarity of human organizing. As a model in action, it is geared towards finding tactical alliances on all scales. This does not mean that everyone is on the team. The opposition is real and distraction, destruction and disengagement are ever present. This model is a tool for visionary activists to conceptualize their position in the pluralist process towards Global Justice. It is a re-imagining of networks, intended to move us towards the goal of discerning which relationships are useful for us to articulate, including markets, governments, non-governmental organizations, spiritual communities and whomever else one wants to include, honor and celebrate as doing the work to bring about Global Justice.

            First, one must choose a point of focus. This could be an individual, a social formation, an object, anything one can identify. Focusing on a particular point, it becomes the intersection of the X and Y-axis. The Y-axis is scale. Everything that the focal point participates in that is larger than itself, a more complex organization which includes itself, extends up the Y-axis. Everything smaller in scale than the point of focus, the levels of organization which comprise it, descend down the Y-axis, below the X-axis. The X-axis shows time moving horizontally. Everything to the left of the Y-axis marking all that has come before. Everything to the right of the Y-axis marking being that which shall emerge as the future. This model is crafted so that we can pin-point an exact time-scale coordinate and map out the ways in which it is participating in generating its part of this fractal pattern as it self-propagates iterations throughout the whole.

Basic Fractal Pluralism Cross Formation:

            Here, we begin this model by describing the vertical Y-axis of space, taking just a snap-shot of what is going on at a given point in time. If we begin with an individual, everything to the left of the Y-axis represents their nature, their nurture, their history of encounters with information, their socio-economic-geographic-historic specificity- all that particularity, what Donna Haraway calls the specificity of specificity. Through all these influencing forces, they will limit their focus; they will choose interests; they will translate those interests into action. Some of this action will be collective, bringing it to a larger scale of the social world. Individuals will cluster, creating social formations- social formations being a word intentionally open enough to encompass the diversity of things that come from people uniting around interests in some sort of activity. Social formations will include the people they consider to be their network, those who they are consciously coordinating their activity with. Scaled up and seen through a broader perspective, they also have their Actor Network. Although they may be diverse in their goals, multiple in the topics they address and that emerge, when pressed, most individuals within social formations can identify a particular issue they most want to impact. This is the level of the Issue Plateau, where the efforts of the particular social formation are co-existing with those of diverse groups locally, regionally and world-wide who are also working to bring about change, to bring about something new, in the topography of that interest area.

            Being Pluralistic in our view of the broad landscape populated by diverse social formations at the level of the interest plateau, we can see how these are often the groups that are in rabid disagreement with each other over the kind of change they want to see. This is also where the opposition exists, holding strong, often controlling the infrastructures of the terrain- exerting with tenacity the destructive, consuming violence of the blind industrial-growth status quo. And this is where the Pluralist perspective enables us to be strategic, redirecting our efforts towards the systems we are working to transform. Instead of wasting our passion by directing our energy towards a potential ally about a response that makes sense to them and that they have come to given their specificity, we can put our energy towards doing our own thing and exerting energy only towards those forces that are truly a threat to global justice.

The Scales of Fractal Pluralism:

            If we can achieve this way of seeing, this strategic, experiential being-ness of compassionate understanding and acceptance, then at the next scale up, at the planetary level, we can feel ourselves united with diverse individuals, social formations and networks from all over the world- all working, dancing, striving, struggling, playing, trying to bring about Global Justice and a life-sustaining culture on this planet. From there you can play it backwards: From all these efforts and desire to bring about Global Justice, people focus on different issue areas by participating in diverse social formations, which address different aspects of an issue, through governments, markets, media, organizations and individuals. They are all  co-existing in relationships outside the consideration by the groups involved, whose activity influences and shapes each other, who almost create the need for each other. Social formations actively articulate their relationships with whom they consider to be their network. Individual social formations are composed of individual people who choose to participate because it is an active expression of their interests and passions based on what makes sense to them given their specificity, their nature, their nurture, and their history of encounters with information.

5: An Example of Fractal Pluralism

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An Example of Fractal Pluralism

       For example, I interviewed Mitch, who works at Zipcar, in Portland, Oregon. Mitch has his socio-economic/ geographic-historical specificity, his nature, his nurture, his history of encounters with information. Throughout his life he has limited his focus and developed interests. When asked what they were, he answered, ”Environmentalism, sports, and electoral politics.” He expresses these in terms of action. He goes camping with his girlfriend, volunteer coaches basketball, watches a lot of CNN and works at Zipcar. If we  look at Zipcar, there are all the people and organizations  they work with -  the Springwater Trust, the stores that give them priority parking, their customes.  To Mitch, this is his network. If we take it further, we can understand the building they pay rent to, their I-phone app. And not only their customers, but all of the reasons why Zipcar is a viable option leading their customers to choose to be a part of Zipcar, and all the other human and non-human actors that support, enable and influence the existence of this one branch of Zipcar as their Actor Network.

            Clearly, Mitch and everyone  involved in Zipcar are working to bring about transformations in transportation, creating options and alternatives for how we get from point A to point B. So transportation is the interest plateau that Zipcar inhabits. There they are right along with people all over the world addressing the issue of transportation, most of whom have a different idea of what alternatives are best and what the overall system should look like.

            It is the groups that are attempting to bring about change in the same area that are most likely the ones in vicious disagreement with each other. Mario, an inventor I interviewed who works with electric cars, thinks that Zipcar is insufficient to bring about the immense changes necessary to address climate change. Mitch thinks Mario’s project and electric cars are overall unrealistic. However, Fractal Pluralism sees their efforts are  in concert with each other, co-existing almost like different kinds of medicinal plants in an eco-system, which simultaneously create options that make sense and are viable for differently situated subjects, who come from different natures, nurtures and with distinct encounters with information who will gravitate towards the options that best fulfill their emotional and pragmatic needs. Seeing Pluralistically does not mean ignoring these differences or undermining points of view. Instead it encourages us to look for the ways in which what could be perceived as a tension or a disagreement on one scale is in fact working in cooperation on another. In this case, both Mario’s project with electric cars and Zipcar are organically involved in the incremental process to transform what is and what we believe to be possible regarding transportation. 

6: Information as Feedback Loop

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Information as a Feedback Loop

            Information is the feedback loop of the entire system. How we could find out about Zipcar, or electric cars at all and especially how we would come to feel the desire to seek out an alternative mode of transportation, are all entirely dependant on what information our attention is turned towards. Information as a term includes direct experience, and now, because of the techno-social structures enabling the contemporary nature of information, we are receiving informational representations generated by the direct experience of others, which feeds back into our perception, weaving with our experience, creating our map of the world. Information our idea of reality and how it works. 

           There is an intensity to the kinds of shock and overwhelming anxiety that can be caused by the nature of information as it corresponds to real issues going on in the world. Mario says he feels that people like him, who are involved in studying environmental issues, are suffering from a kind of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The information he is being turned towards is literally that distressing, the feeling of isolation and powerlessness that strong. In dealing with the overwhelming volume of information and, often, the intense emotional response to the content, we must limit. As subjects competently navigating the social world we must choose what we care about, what we actively open our perceptual sphere to.

            Receiving information, we transmute our emotional response into action and now, increasingly, we create an informational representation of that action, feeding it back into the system. Making our addition to the collective map of what the world is and what is possible, generating the information that others then respond to. The more that people follow this pattern, producing informational representations of their experience, the more it becomes a social category to be fulfilled. Which is to say, the more we as people feel the desire to follow the form of this pattern, the need to express ourselves in this way. This is a self-perpetuating cycle shaped by techno-social structures. The increase in access to the techno-social means of producing and receiving information seems to be accelerating exponentially. Meaning that, right now, this cycle is self-perpetuating exponentially. And it is all this information, all this representation, all of this voice emerging from everyone, everywhere, sharing what they are doing, that is ushering in the need for a Pluralism paradigm. Information being a Pluralist generator, informing ourselves of ourselves.

Information to Action:

Information -->  Limiting Subject -->  Point of Entry-->

<--Informational Representation  <-- Course of Action

*A self-perpetuating cycle

           

            Here is an example from David, an 7^th grade school teacher at The Sunnyside School in Portland, Oregon. At the Sunnyside School, the month of January is framed as a month of service in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. The theme for David’s class was deforestation. Originally, David felt at a loss for how to tackle such a large topic, but ultimately, he found a point of entry.

My buddy works at this place Green Empowerment, and they work in third world communities helping them practice sustainable farming and be able to keep doing what they’re doing, but not do it in a way where they are destroying the environment at the same time. And so our class spent a month learning about this one biosphere in Nicaragua (through a Green Empowerment project) and finding out ways that we could support it and talk about it.

The students then conceived of their own project ideas for how to raise money to support this organization. All of the student’s projects were uploaded on a website about this one class’s service project about this one biosphere in Nicaragua and was made accessible through a link on the school’s main webpage. Although David voiced his opinion that their contributions were modest, both with respect to helping Green Empowerment and to the larger issue of deforestation, what he felt the project accomplished was transmitting a method for dealing with harsh informational awareness in a constructive way.

I think it teaches them how to figure out more stuff, and then act on this stuff and do things… instead of being overwhelmed with everything that’s going on in the world. I mean, I’m overwhelmed with everything that’s going on in the world, you know? They’re able- even though it’s small scale stuff- they’re able to feel empowered in what they’re doing, like,“(one quotation mark, not 2)Hey, I’m doing something cool, I’m making a difference.’ The four girls who raised a hundred dollars in a bake sale felt pretty cool about themselves. I had some boys who wrote a song and recorded it on the computer. And we made a website… and it’s all out in the world wide web and you can search it on Google and they feel like it’s just- they’ve just really gotten up there.

7: Going Quantum: Adding Time

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F.P. Going Quantum: Adding Time

         A behavior of fractals, discovered while measuring coast lines- another fractal- is that the smaller the unit of measurement, the larger the territory being measured appears to be. When scientists used smaller implements, they were able to record more detail, resulting in a larger final measurement. So tracking the micro-processes leading to why someone is a certain way  in the world is a much more complex and practically infinite map compared to how the micro-processes between individuals lead to the way an organization is. This  is more detailed still  than tracking how the interactions between organizations comprise and create how their network is. The scale of the interest plateau is so large, that the unit of measurement available, tracking processes, once again becomes small, rendering the territory intricately complex. This explains why Collon and LaTour described Actor Network Theory as an exercise. They did not believe the taxonomy could ever be completed, but the kind of thinking the practice encourages approximates a closer understanding to how things come into being and how social change actually occurs.

            In terms of the overall model, the starting unit of scale should be the smallest unit of perception we can identify as acting in the social world. Because we are at a historical moment when the majority of humans experience an individuated consciousness, the smallest starting unit of scale would be an individual. In terms of the starting unit of time for the X-axis, it follows that the smallest action that we can track for an individual acting in the social world is that of a single decision. This is the root pattern of the wave, the form from which it builds. Because information is the feedback loop of the entire system, both the information generated by direct experience and the informational representations generated out of the direct experience of others, enter the individual perceiver as information.

            As information is received, directionally, it dips bellow the X-axis, into the internal world of the individual, interacting with their consciousness, which is conditioned by all that has come before. This produces an emotional reaction, which then rises up, above the X-axis, showing itself in the social world, emerging as a single unit of decision making. Making a decision produces more information, which then dips back bellow the X-axis, interacting with consciousness, producing an emotional response, giving trajectory to the following decision. The overall pattern of this process rising and falling forms a wave. It is the vibratory signature of a person through time. As they move through the social world, this wave fractals through the scales, generating iterations of itself. Each individual within decision making process contributes in creating the composite tone that is the decision of a social formation. Social formations resonate their decision making patterns through their networks and the Actor Network, effecting the decision making harmonics of all the actants within the immediate realm of influence and beyond as their wave becomes part of the pattern song that is being resonated at all the iterations of scale. Establishing an axis intersection point is the process of isolating a particle in this fractal wave form in order to understand the way that it is involved in generating this pattern as it propagates itself.

Decision Wave Form:

            Tracking all the iterations of the information-emotional response- decision-making-information unit coiling through time generating epi-cycles in the amplitudes of scales quickly spirals into all arrows pointing in all directions, to all points at all scales. Thus tightly weaving into the fabric of space and time. An individual life is evocatively reflective of the principles of calligraphy. In the art of calligraphy, what internally wants to be expressed is found in the external form available for that expression. The written character for joy is a form whose lines are expressive of joy. As one writes, they embody the absolute feeling of joy inside themselves. The internal feeling and the external form become collapsed in the dynamic experience of creating the expression itself. So too, a person’s life is their calligraphy- their inner world and their outward expression merging. The experiential strokes drawing the form of their life, their pattern resonating through the calligraphy of the whole- extending through time, patterning through scale.

            By pausing the flow of time to identify the particle within the wave, we can become aware of what Anthony Giddens calls Struturation. We are a product of all that has come before, structured by the ways it has shaped us, we have the ability to act with unique creativity at every moment. Or as Marx said it, ‘the people are made by history and in turn have the opportunity to make history.’

            Pulling apart the temporal aspects of this process, mapping out the linear history of the wave, may not be useful to you. However, this model affords us the perspective to be able to see the importance of individual decision-making and of the individual. This entire model relies on conscious value-driven, ethically motivated decision making to function in a healthy, progressive and constructive way. Which means that much of the healthy functioning of this system lies beneath the phenomenological horizon line of our smallest unit, the individual. It is a complex swarm down there bellow the X-axis, and reflective awareness is only brought to a fraction of the decisions an individual makes. Much evidence shows that to really have an affect in shifting someone’s behaviors, change must happen in their internal world, in their emotional body. It seems like this may be happening more and more because of the feedback loop of information. 

8: Bringing Together Time and Space within Fractal Pluralism

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Bringing Together Time and Space within Fractal Pluralism 

            William Connnolly, a brilliant theorist of Pluralism, says that the openness and complexity of Pluralism can only be navigated with an ethical compass. Right in line with this, the information feedback loop at this historical moment seems to be generating a greater moral awareness and the desire to life a life more driven by values. More and more there is an outright longing to live in this way. The contemporary nature of information has turned us towards the social systems undergridding the basic infrastructure of production and consumption. The producers and means of production are not as invisible as they once were. The environmental impact of our consumptive systems are continuously being brought to light. The flood of the information feedback loop is pushing us beyond ethical decision making into value-based, life style cultures. In the vast array of options we become aware of choice. In the illumination of the ways our actions affect and create the systems of our co-existance, we become aware of our responsibility to decide how to live. The moral implications of our behavior and the dynamics of ideology have begun showing up in the decisions of everyday life. In the landscape of heterogeneous capitalism, we can see this with cause branding. Being marketed to on the basis of our values is a signal that we are making more decisions based on values.  Innovators and consumers are bringing their awareness to areas that can be shifted, niches that can be filled and responding with action, making those options available to the larger whole.

            Understanding how an individual decision reverberates through the scales, creating what the world is, is crucial for understanding our role and responsibility in bringing about Global Justice. If a person’s time-scale perspective is: my family, this year, then they literally cannot see the implications or ramifications their choices have, or even how they are a part of the bigger picture. From a limited time-scale perspective certain decisions genuinely make sense that in a broader view clearly  have devastating repercussions.

            If your time-scale perspective is: nation-states, this century; you might think the most horrifying issue around is starvation in Africa. Whereas if your time-scale perspective is: nation-states, the millennium; it would seem like the sending of food to geographic locations where people are dying of starvation is the problem, because it keeps more people alive and being born who then face starvation. External aid is artificially providing sustenance for that eco-system, influencing their ability to develop a self-sustaining ecology between humans, nature and technology.

            If you are a time-scale pluralist, you see how both points are valid and how both foreign aid and regional development, along with multiple other factors are continually leading to the changes that are coming about and  influencing what will continue on into the future. If you are a Fractal Pluralist, then you feel that the transmutation, the development through and beyond the issue of starvation, is critical and necessary for the overall well-being of the planetary system while also seeing that the issue will be and is being taken on by those who are directly affected as well as those who are engaged in a form of participation that feeds their emotional or pragmatic needs.

            What this model enables us to do as diverse types of people working to bring about a better world, is that it gives us the ability to contextualize our efforts within the ecology of distinct time-scale perspectives and activities. Here, modeling just the spatial scales of our human activity is especially illuminating and advantageous. Mapping out social space allows us to stop, see what is, see the bigger picture, become lucid in our decision making, look for grounds of possibility and develop targeted, consciously designed, creative response strategies. From the vantage point of an individual, one can step into empowered choice about where to direct  one’s energy, what social formations one wants to be a part of as a mode of affecting change on which Interest Plateaus. What issues make sense for one to be a part of given one’s specificity and gifts and what issues one must entrust to others, in faith and understanding that efforts are being undertaken. 

9. Re-Imagining Networks

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Re-Imagining Networks

  This model illustrates a re-imagining of networks. With the rise of network thinking, more and more social formations are seeking to organize themselves and coordinate along network patterns. This is in line with the thrust of up-scaling cooperative activity between social entities. Coming to agreement within one social formation is a significantly involved, energy intensive process. The energy required can become extrapolated and maximized when trying to bring multiple social formations into agreement. Often this is necessary work, a process for the members involved to come to greater understanding of their own position and for the network to be able to generate more action through deepening feelings of connectivity. However, there is the possibility that organizing the network can take a predominant position of the in the energies and efforts of the group.

            The activities of diverse social formations are already working in concert with each other, even when the connectivity is not being actively articulated by the groups involved. Fractal Pluralism can be used as a discerning  device for when and how to invest energy in articulating network connections and strategizing the most efficient network practice and design. This intentionally empowers shrewd and strategic choice around focusing our time to actively cultivate only the sort of relationship that is most rewarding to us given a particular time-scale.  This helps us to determine who we may not even want as part of our potential network, but whose activity pattern we can accept as Pluralist co-participants. We must choose our battles. We must choose what makes sense to us.  We have our passions. Others have theirs. We are all working together even when we are not actively articulating our connectivity. Making these discernments will directly enhance our ability to be effective. It will allow us to focus the full force of our organizing power into generating our own patterns of a life sustaining global culture and target our efforts precisely and only towards those who truly stand in opposition to it.

            Because the condition we find ourselves in is so dire and because power is being wielded so irresponsibly,  the movement for a life-sustaining global culture has a chance. The opposition is tremendous and yet, that might be what is needed to catalyze the movement. Opposition  can be the seed of passion, creativity and drive. When times get difficult, we are pushed towards action. After so long of being pushed by violence, perhaps we are beginning to be pulled by vision. And the opposition is itself fractaled, it is there at every time-scale coordinate simultaneously. The dialectic is diffuse and multiple, as present in daily life as it is in the arc of entire life paths. It is within us - in every decision, in every breath, we perform this alchemy, deciding what wave form we resonate through the whole.

10: Playing in Pluralistic Time-Scales

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Playing in Pluralistic Time-Scales

            A recent documentary on the bank bail out of 2008 was appropriately titled, Too Big To Fail. As the financial crisis hit, leaders who felt a sense of responsibility for the United States, and its population of 300 million+ people were suspended in a state of confusion and panic so paralyzing that for many their time-scale shrunk down to immediate survival: tomorrow, this week, this month. From that perspective ‘Too Big To Fail’ is the fear-based conclusion that makes the most social sense. The financial system, Wall Street, the banks are all too big to fail because they form the organizing system that deals with and makes legitimate our money. And money is the way that those 300 million+ people get what they need for their survival. Years later, in 2011, the reverberations of the instability of the financial system continued to intensify- homes were being foreclosed, unemployment was high, people couldn’t pay their mortgages. Conservatives were trying to exert moral pressure to maintain a time-scale perspective of: your family, this year. Framing the financial melt down as individual failure to pay off debts and evoking moral pressure was necessary to reinforce the validity of the governing economic system.

             In 2008, that conservative strategy had been relatively successful in maintaining business as usual. In 2011 people took to the streets. They saw a larger pattern of economic injustice generated by the internal logic of the system that was purportedly the mechanism and means of their survival. As the dominant story corresponds less and less to lived experience, fissures of doubt can get between conditioning and observation. As more information produced through lived experience lifts from its context and circulates, the more the dominant story becomes populated by Pluralist accounts.

            Any model that seeks to describe a progressive process of turning the tide of this magnitude must account for the basic, pragmatic needs of the people involved. The model must be sustainable- as in able to sustain a global population of humans and other life forms on this earth, at least as imperfectly as we’ve experienced so far. To truly be sustainable, this model must also fulfill our emotional needs,meaning, connection, stimulation, purpose, joy. We do, after all, want a revolution where people are dancing.

            We find ourselves emeshed in present structures and systems, the heterogeneous capitalism by which means we provide for ourselves and our families. We can acknowledge the pluralist state of the economic system which encompasses the more pernicious forces of late capitalism- advertising, Monsanto, the prison-industrial complex- alongside the genuine efforts of individuals and social formations to bring forward alternatives everywhere along the spectrum from modest to radical. We can see these people, we can see ourselves, not as hypocritical parasites leaching off the very system we seek to smash  but as good bacteria working to shift the overall composition of our host organism. 

            Whatever an individual, social formation or network brings forward, if enough people feel that it is fulfilling their emotional or pragmatic needs, they will support it with their financial contributions, participation, or whatever else it needs to continue on. The nature of enterprise and innovation is that those at its core will try long and hard to maintain the project, from their own passion, sense of self and feelings of responsibility. If after all their striving, the venture cannot find a way to continue, then either the powers it is up against are too great or it is simply not fulfilling the emotional and pragmatic needs of the people involved or the context which it is attempting to serve. It is a necessary failure. More accurately, it is a step in the succession of evolution.

            Far from lamenting the evanescence of human organizing, we can see this as accelerated adaptation to a fractaled dialectic. What is not an effective means of bringing people together, confronting hegemonic powers  or an attractive enough vision to magnetize people towards it dissolves back into all that is. Lessons learned are carried forward in the people- informing, growing, evolving within them as they move forward to new projects and relationships. They leave behind informational representations of their model, story, process, making it available for others to learn from. They leave behind an imprint of  whatever they did accomplish, internally and externally , even if it was not the grand, lasting or definitive impact that was hoped for.

            Some writers in the wake of the 1960’s wrote despairingly about what a failure that social movement was. That is a very short time-scale  view. Now we can see how everything since has been built on the watershed of that cultural shift. It marks an irreversible change that all proceeding generations now grow from. Perhaps certain people’s visions weren’t realized and the dialectical backlash of conservative, imperialist capitalist conditioning struck hard, but the impact of the change that movement generated is undeniable.

            Maybe the people who most feel like the 1960’s or other social movements are a failure, are those who are hoping for a totalizing system instead of a pluralistic one. We are all distinct, coming from and embedded within diverse and specific contexts. The means by which we will seek to have our emotional and pragmatic needs met are similarly distinct, diverse and multiple. It follows that our vision of Global Justice must be pluralistic enough to hold multiple visions of Global Justice. And we must believe in ourselves enough and trust each other enough to get it- to get that we are the ones bringing it forward. Examples may be more mundane than what first comes to mind. It might be camping with your girlfriend and working at Zipcar. It might be teaching science to kids, which is how Mario makes the money to keep on working on his electric car technology projects and  pay rent. 

11: Individuality

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Individuality

            Because fractals are patterns that cyclically repeat, taking the same form at infinitely larger and smaller scales, any point, in fact, every point, that you would isolate, identify, focus on, is the center. Every point is the center. What this model shows more than anything, again and again, is that you matter. Your decisions matter, all your decisions matter, because action is the nourishment of the social world. What you support financially and with your participation determines what is able to continue  Your internal world matters, your patterns, fears, traumas, dreams, mental health.It all matters because you will propagate yourself in everything you do. Jamie Janover says that his favorite example of a fractal is that people come out of other people. So do organizations, businesses, governments, media. It is all self-propagating.

            If we are representative of our specificity, learning ourselves, following the grooves it has left on us is coming to understand our particle of the wave of the world at the historic, geographic intersection of  our specificity.  Buddhists call  this samkhara. The process of coming to know yourself better, of coming into yourself is actually excavating this heritage. Feeling its imprint upon you, the way it has carved the contours of your individuality is the process of transmuting the elements of the dialectic that converge within the microcosm of your specificity. This global justice comes through yourself, through knowing yourself better. Whatever fear, anger, trauma, joy, creative light lives inside your heart, go to it. Profoundly. Somewhere in there lies your calling. In these depths, you discover your gifts,  your true passion, your highest self and what it is that you really want for yourself, so you know what you want to see reflected in the world, so you can bring it into being.

            In terms of a pluralistic vision of Global Justice, you doing exactly what you want to do, in at least some areas of your life, is possibly the most important thing you can do to bring about global justice in our life time on this planet.. For it is through you bringing your vision into the world that you create the world that you want to live in. And through more and more people realizing their life’s path, we are collectively creating the reality we all want to live in, a world woven of our highest excitement and reflecting our most unique and meaningful creativity. Teaching science to kids, immigrant rights, a music venue- whatever it is, if enough people share that vision, if the way that it is coming into being meets the emotional or pragmatic needs of the people involved or the context it is attempting to serve, then it will be nourished and able to continue on. And this resonates through every scale of our decision making. The more that you support the kind of activity you want in the world, the more sustaining that waveform is.

            There is a historical context to the experience and importance of individuality. We imagine that in the eras before modernity, back when the boundary condition of world view was direct experience,  human beings more often shared a cohesive cultural experience with those around them. Their lives adapted to and emerged from a particular eco-system. Their was language composed from its sounds; their homes were drawn from the materials of its landscape. Their bodies were nourished by  life’s seasons  Their ailments came from that ecology and the treatments were provided by that environment. We imagine that in their tribal organization the traditional delineation of roles formed an organismic whole. Members embodied social archetypes, the sum of which comprised the full wheel of potential human experience. The anthropological record tells us these cultures had rich traditions. Philosophies, arts, sciences and mystic practices that structured human expression, providing the loom that each successive generation  wove upon and innovated within. We can see their lives almost as embroidery; feeling the texture of their collective expression as a unified tapestry woven directly from the landscape by many human hands.

            We have gone through a long and painful process of individuation,. We have been torn from our original ecologies or seen them desecrated and destroyed. We have been severed from collective ties, communal living and all the feelings of safety, belonging and being cared for that provided. Our labor is alienated.We are detached from the cycles of the natural world, left without models and mentors to guide us into adulthood, to teach us the meaning of things, to teach us wisdom.

         
           We are individuals now. The contemporary nature of information barreling all the specificity of specificity of who a person is and is supposed to be given their position in the cross fibres. Information about everything the world was, and everything the world is pushes against the individual, against this one point, this one perceptual center of the entire fractal whole. The intense pressure creating the experience of individual-ness itself, compressing into that mysterious play of nature and nurture, that infinite swarm of micro-processes, praxis, internal worlds and external interactions, compressing. The immense pressure of it exerting the force that defines and delineates the very skin of the individual. So that from that one point, from all that has been compressed inside, the individual responds from their Structurated specificity, externally expressing all those forces, all that makes them who they are. They express a single point embroidery. Their very being itself  expressing that single point embroidery- part of the global tapestry. A hyper-context of experience on this earth. This is the fractaling down of the whole world inside of us.