PART II: FURTHER RELECTIONS ON SYSTEM PERTURBATIONS

This will continue the System Perturbation discussion on 5GW on from Part I. and comment on select elements in the following posts:

“‘Global Guerrillas’ as 5GW Warriors” by Curtis at Dreaming 5GW

“Toward Ensembles Acting with Authority” by RevG at Christian Soldiers

First off, I liked both of these posts for the depth at which each author considered the implications of the system perturbation concept as applied to human affairs. I have points of agreement and disagreement but I will limit myself to a few examples of each.

Curtis Gale Weeks wrote:

” …have said many times: the hardest thing to track is a meme. But I have never given an explanation for why this is so. Here it is: memes do not travel. They are not transmitted. They emerge. Within individuals. This is OODA. “

This was interesting. I agree there are clear-cut instances of memetic emergence – take for example, calculus with Newton and Leibniz. On the other hand, the track record for transmission of long existing memes by observation seems to be pretty well established across the animal kingdom, though in the collective sense, with culture, individual transmission of menes would amount to emergence. Depends on the perspective at which we are arguing this point.

“However, these various GG rule-sets will emerge in multiple places, as the result of slightly or perhaps very different observations or of different immediate concrete effects / environments. In Robb-speak, this means that the various GG factions will have no ‘common’ motivation. He once said that they will have a similar objective; and, I responded at the time that a similar objective is a similar motivation, insofar as objectives motivate individuals to act”

Generally, Global Guerillas will not manage to set off system perturbations, such events are rare things, but their destructive actions will add to the aggregate amount of “noise” in the system. The “noise” or “chaos” ( or “entropy” or ” novelty”) is the the disintegration of the old system which creates a certain fluidity or space in which people will naturally seek out rules to create certainty. The weakening of the old system’s authority makes the construction of new rule-sets both easier and harder while creating the necessity to do so.

So Global Guerillas might have a “common effect”. And should they succeed in setting off a system perturbation what is accomplished is a dramatic acceleration of the process.

RevG wrote:

“Those who act upon fundamentals analysis require relatively stable systems or at least ones where system perturbation can be anticipated. System perturbation creates novelty, a kinder term than chaos or entropy but functionally identical. Their fundamentals analysis apprehends a historical view anticipating traditional cause and effect chains to continue intact. The required assumption of continuity is key with significant system perturbations necessitating a new or at least revised fundamental analysis. As human endeavor has evolved these chains have become both more complex and more complicated. Complexity has increased as the number of chains has propagated. Even though each chain may be simple, the sheer number of cause and effect chains has increased by a huge factor. This has lead to the emergence of unpredictable secondary effects due solely to there being vastly more cause and effect chains. This proliferation of the number of cause and effect chains, this increase in complexity, has contributed to a higher level of novelty”

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