Sorry. By unidimensional politics, I meant the typical left vs right. But even individual vs collective would be similarly over-reducing (though it wouldn't elevate my blood pressure so much). There are left individualists as well as right individualists, as in the paper Russ just posted.
But the essence of my coupled oscillators proposal is that of a heterarchy where some higher order oscillations comprise some lower order osscillations. But *some* collections of oscillators don't compose higher order oscillations (which could mean an [in|de]crease of some kind, including entropy). I haven't thought it through, but perhaps some higher order oscillations may not comprise lower order oscillations at all ... maybe an illusory "beat" or somesuch. Anyway, it's all too vague to be useful. I should not have included it. I'm more interested in the ossified structures that constrain things, like SCOTUS gutting the VRA, allowing people to cross the border to vote, disallowing mail-in voting, gerrymandering, etc. With the re-election of Vučić and Orbán, and Musk taking majority share in Twitter (by which I suspect we'll soon see Trump's account reinstated), I've come back to doubting our conception of "fair" (and egalitarianism as a whole) is at all coherent. On 4/4/22 11:20, Marcus Daniels wrote:
Glen writes: < I think there's some kind of "plucking" going on with democracy. By "pluck", I mean something like a player-piano with coupled oscillators decorated by flanges, plucking the other oscillators. Short of some Causa Prima argument, there need be no fundamental driver (like in a player piano). It could just be a wandering or perhaps periodic manifestation of the coupling. It's that model which forces me to reject the simple pendulum model of uni-dimensional politics. Every time someone says "It's a pendulum. It'll swing back the other way eventually" my cardiovascular system is aroused and I can't help but object. Where does the energy come from? Does it wander? Is the wandering progressive? Is Pinker right and even if it plucks back regressively sometimes, is the larger ephemeris progressive? Or is it actually just chaotically exploring the whole space of possibilities? You don't know. Nobody knows! (That's when they get all worried that I'm unstable and try to change the conversation to food or football or somesuch nonsense.) > Just to be clear, the dimension ranges between the collective power of many individuals who individually have limited power vs. the collective power of a fewer individuals that have more? Or is it the degree of enforcement over the behavior of each group, or of the kind or topic of enforcement over the behavior of each group? I could sort of see oscillation arising from the first and second kind. If the economy is functioning well, and the distribution of wealth through the population is stable over time, then less control might be exerted over groups and entropy could increase. If things aren't going so well, then one might expect some individuals with power or visibility to be used as prototypes, and that's how fascism or theocracy or ethnic cleansing would arise again -- the complicated story of life must be made less complicated so that it can be "better regulated" by the "wise men". But once the regulations are imposed, then again people start to fight for their autonomy and to be more than a cog in the machine of some Putin-like person. On CNN this morning they had the footage of Bucha with civilians' hands tied and shot -- left in piles or in the street, and then 30 seconds later remarks from Jamie Dimon on the outlook for the economy. Somehow the left is going to get blamed for that detachment -- a civilization that has high entropy and many frames of reference will probably have more indirection between an action and a reaction. So much easier to prescribe what matters and doesn't matter.
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