On 1/21/14 5:29 PM, glen wrote:
On 01/21/2014 11:42 AM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
Some constituents of a fascist society can be scattered, but some
members, esp. the leaders or those guilty of `war crimes' get hunted
down. Cells form the organisms be compared to, so it is not surprising
that they are more easily discarded.
Good point. Are there some cells, in the same cancer, that are more (or
less) metastatic than other cells in that same cancer? Although it
seems reasonable that some cells will be more likely to dislodge from
the tissue and traipse around, it's not clear to me that we've fully
validated the distinction between metastatic and non-metastatic cancer
cells.
What was the train-riding hobo phenomenon of the 30's? Was that
diaspora of unemployed young men a good thing or a bad thing for the
country?
Anyway, if so, then we could credibly map mobile cancer cells to
leaders, gurus, prophets, virile breeders, etc. within totalitarian
systems. But that still doesn't mean that physically breaking up a
tumor consisting of all non-metastatic cells, and scattering those cells
across the body would _not_ cause all sorts of new tumors wherever these
non-metastatic cells landed. I.e. perhaps the only thing keeping
non-metastatic cancer cells from being metastatic is their lack of
mobility, a problem solved by the scattering intervention.
During WWII, the US Gov't (backed by the good citizens) rounded up US
Citizens of Japanese descent and stuffed them in internment (aka
Concentration?!) here in the US. As far as I know, there were NO
incidents (yes, I know... google and wikipedia and ... are my friend
here) of any sedition or similar from that community, before, during or
after internment.
However... right here in river city (within sight of the Santa Fe River
in fact), we had our own *special* internment camp... where many of the
" leaders" of the Japanese communities that were rounded up were sent to
prevent "organization and dissent". These were the Buddhist monks...
the spiritual leaders... and it is likely that if there *were* going to
be a problem with this particular population, leaving their spiritual
leaders *with* them would have been a good idea, rather than removing
the most evident of "self regulatory" mechanisms from the "organs"...
This might be quite distinct from scattering the non-leader members of a
totalitarian system. By definition of totalitarianism, I would posit
that the non-leaders are not really capable of starting their own
budding totalitarian states. I'd be more likely to accept an analogy
between a more organic -ism (e.g. Al-Qaeda) and cancer. The key
property is the autonomy, the colony forming ability, of the constituents.
As I posited myself in an earlier post... analogy-making and metaphor
are useful for brainstorming, exploration, synthesis of ideas...
Thanks for continuing this exploration.
- Steve
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