[ by Charles Cameron — religious law enforcement, therapy incarcerated, and a quick blast of Johnny Cash ]
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As you know, I collect instances of various patterns I see recurring in my twitterstream and elsewhere — here, I’d like to introduce a new pattern that I’ll simply call “simple incongruities”.
My first example, which I ran across several days ago, was this one from Saudi Arabia:
A Saudi motorist died and a passenger was injured on Tuesday when a religious police vehicle crashed into their car during a hot pursuit in Riyadh, a newspaper reported. A patrol of the notorious police, known unofficially as Mutawaa, chased two young men travelling in a sedan before crashing into their vehicle, forcing it off an overpass and onto a lower-level road, Al-Hayat daily said. The patrol vehicle fled the scene instantly, the daily said. “We pray to Allah to forgive the dead,” said Mohammed al-Shraimi, assistant spokesman of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the official name of the Mutawaa.
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It’s my second example — from nearer home — which I only ran across today that inspired me to make a separate post about these incongruities. The image of caged prisoners in a group therapy session at San Quentin (see above) was just too remarkable for me to pass over. The tweet that brought it to my attention is below:
Astonishing picture of a group therapy session in a California prison; http://t.co/pirlQYqHG4
[ by Charles Cameron — where paradox begets form in phrasing, redux ]
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Here for your entertainment and entrainment are some further instances where the tweet doubles back on itself, bites its tail, or otherwise embodies some form of “form” that’s noteworthy in its own right, and possibly indicative of the heart of a problem — think of these tweets as eddies in the flow of things, knots in the wood…
Two arms crossed as in that MC Escher hand-draws-hand piece:
Microeconomics successfully describes situations that never occur. Macroeconomics unsuccessfully describes situations that occur constantly.
The time has come. According to the Terminator clock, at 8:11 p.m. Tuesday, Skynet will become self-aware. And humanity will be screwed. Going by canon set out in the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series, Judgment Day should hit Thursday.
Never mind Mikko, this one’s funny too — if and only if one’s also familiar with Wikipedia, which seems plausible in all cases for those who follow twitter — it wins double-honors in fact, hitting it out of the self-reference ball-park and into parallelism as satire:
This Tweet has multiple issues.
This Tweet needs additional citations for verification.
This Tweet may need to be rewritten entirely.
Namarupa, or “name and form”, has to do with parallelisms between a name and its referent — or what zen might call the “finger pointing” and the moon — always fun:
Wow. The spokesperson for nightmare meatpacker Hormel is named Julie Craven. I guess Jane Evil couldn't be lured away from BP.
The next one depends on your knowing that the Greek mythological creature known as a Naiad refers to “any of the nymphs in classical mythology living in and giving life to lakes, rivers, springs, and fountains”:
Last Thursday as I was rolling into the Pentagon Metro station I noticed from the train window a giant sign that read, “Snowden Honored His Oath. Honor Yours! Stop Big Brother!”
Before I could snap a picture or see who’d sponsored the sign, the train was rolling out. For the rest of the weekend I wondered who had the chutzpah (and the inventiveness) to praise Snowden at the Pentagon stop, where it’s far more common to see ads from lobbyists praising the merits of some piece of military tech.
Turns out it was the Oath Keepers, “a coalition of current and former military, police, and other public officials [who] have pledged not to obey unconstitutional commands.”
And the enantiodromia here, the sudden switcheroo? That’s to do with Greenwald suddenly tweeting an appreciation of the OathKeepers — not his usual allies by any stretch of the imagination. So this one might equally be filed under “strange bedfellows”.
Or a “one two combo” perhaps? Left jab right cross, to be specific?
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So where does the word come from? Carl Jung more or less borrowed the word from Heraclitus, as quoted by Diogenes Laërtius (ix. 7) in a passage that defies easy translation. Fortunately, as Wikipedia helpfully notes:
Plato in the Phaedo will articulate the principle clearly: “Everything arises in this way, opposites from their opposites.” (sect. 71a).
Jung explains Heraclitus’ meaning as he understands it:
In the philosophy of Heraclitus it is used to designate the play of opposites in the course of events — the view that everything that exists turns into its opposite…
and as he himself uses the term:
I use the term enantiodromia for the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time.
Would you prefer a more contemporary reference? John Perry Barlow even gave a TED talk about it:
Everybody understands the obvious meaning of the world struggle in which we are engaged. We are defending freedom against tyranny and are trying to preserve justice against a system which has, demonically, distilled injustice and cruelty out of its original promise of a higher justice.
The second is from UK’s Labour MP, Sir Gerald Kaufman, who once said:
My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town a German soldier shot her dead in her bed. … My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza.
Right or wrong, Kaufman was in effect asserting the danger of enantiodromia…
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Note well that enantiodromiais mostly used to refer to a single switchback: iterative enantiodromia would be a form of boustropehdon.
Note also that David Myatt, whose comment on enantiodromia in Heraclitus I linked to above, is an interesting fellow in his own right, having been a leading UK neonazi for decades, then converting to Islam and preaching jihad and praise of bin Laden — now finally settling into his (hopefully, final) role as an English country gentleman and proponent of moderation in all things — an ex-twice-extremist anti-extremist, itself quite an enantiodromic turn of events…
[ by Charles Cameron — another exploration into forms of insight — in this case the Matrioshka effect, spiral staircases and the like, with a glance at holy winds and human fingertips ]
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A mention of blogs about blogs about blogs seems to me to qualify for the “nested serpent” category of forms that are worth watching out for, the nest (or spiral, from which I am guessing the nest is not entirely separable) being of particular interest because while seemingly simple enough, it all too often reaches at one end or both into the infinities, where paradox meets epiphany… as my second example will show.
But first, by sheer good fortune, I came across this verse from the book of Ecclesiastes as I was polishing this post for publication:
The winde goeth toward the South, and turneth about vnto the North; it whirleth about continually, and the winde returneth againe according to his circuits.
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That’s the pattern we’re looking for, and I ran across it recently in a comment my friend Allen Stairs made, and the response he received:
Imagine a Russian doll set isomorphic to the natural numbers.
Bet that didn't work very well, did it?
Okay, I didn’t follow — so I asked Allen for an explanation, and he wrote me:
Actually. “equipollent” was a bad choice of terms. “Equinumerous” wold have been better.
But the thing about numbers and those dolls: natural numbers have their identity intrinsically, so to speak. In set theory, one way to represent them is as the series
1 = {Ø}, 2 = {Ø,{Ø}}, 3 = {Ø,{Ø,{Ø}}}, etc.
In fact, we can even use the simpler construction
1 = {Ø}, 2 = {{Ø}}, 3 = {{{Ø}}}, etc.
So if we’re given the set, its structure tells us which number it is. I
Now a finite set of Russian dolls does much the same thing. We could count the innermost one as 1, the next as 2, the next as 3, and so on, and if you were given the doll, you’d be able to tell which number it represented. Or if we wanted, we could let the outermost doll represent 1, and work our way in. But if we take the set of all natural numbers, things get a little wonkier. The thing about a set of dolls is that there’s an outer one; the charm is in the fact that there’s a place to start opening them. So suppose we have an infinitely nested set of dolls. What number does the outermost one correspond to? It can’t be a natural number, because for any natural number, the nesting would have to be finite. It can’t be the infinite number Aleph-null because among other things, if the nesting is infinite downward then each doll has the same structure as the one that encloses it, and so it seems that there’s no way for the individual dolls to represent distinct integers.
Now if we’re given the whole set of dolls, there’s a sort of substitute: match dolls to numbers depending on how many “predecessors” they have. The outermost doll has no predecessors, so let it be 1; the next one in has 1 predecessor, so let it be 2. And so on. But we still have a problem: there’s nothing about the doll itself that tells us which integer it represents.
So my little point was that Harold’s joke was about “how many?” but the thing about the dolls is that they might seem at first to have the right structure to represent the natural numbers, and yet they don’t — at least, not the whole set of natural numbers.
Although invisible, the Holy Wind can be recognized by the swirling and spiraling traces that it continually leaves in the visible world. The Winds that enter a human being leave their trace, according to the Navajo, in the vortices or swirling patterns to be seen on our fingertips and the tips of our toes, and in the spiraling pattern made by the hairs as they emerge from our heads. As one elder explains:
There are whorls here at the tips of our fingers. Winds stick out here. It is the same way on the toes of our feet, and Winds exist on us here where soft spots are, where there are spirals. At the tops of our heads some children have two spirals, some have only one, you see. I am saying that those (who have two) live by means of two Winds. These (Winds sticking out of the) whorls at the tips of our toes hold us to the Earth. Those at our fingertips hold us to the Sky. Because of these, we do not fall when we move about.
That last italicized quote is from James Kale McNeley, Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy — a remarkable book for anyone interested in the holiness of spirit…
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
