"As long as the mind keeps silent in the motionless world of its hopes, everything is reflected and arranged in the unity of its nostalgia. But with its first move, the world cracks and tumbles: an infinite number of shimmering fragments is offered to its understanding." - Albert Camus

The campaign season is now in full swing as the Republicans seek to find the man who will challenge Obama, and then things will really heat up on the blogosphere. This brings to mind a general topic of interest: discussing how we discuss things.  A particular incident on a recent thread when admonished advice of KISS: Keep it Simple, Stupid. 

This general rule of thumb can serve one well.  Some of us do have the tendency to complicate matters more than they need be.  Keeping things simple can be a more effective means to a successful outcome, no less true when we get enmeshed in political discussions.  Yet...if we are to actually have productive and meaningful political discussions in the coming year, we would also benefit from heeding the principle of KICS, or Keep it Complex, Sillyhead.

Our natural tendency is to perceive and understand the world through a binary framework.  This is keeping things simple.  From an evolutionary point of view this makes complete sense.  It is a matter of survival.  When the deer looks up from the stream upon smelling a scent, it seeks to know whether the odor represents danger or not-danger.  Going beyond this, delving into the nuances, so to say, serves not beneficial purpose if the smell does indeed represent a clear and present danger. 

This binary framework is embedded into the very structure of our language.  The letter “” is “a” is “a” by its virtue of not being “not-a.”  It doesn’t matter what other letters are in the alphabet, what constitutes the “not-a” – there could be a thousand or just one other letter.  Similarly, any particular word in the language, say “deer” is capable of existing, serving a function to denote some thing because it is differentiated from that which “not-deer.”  We could go on forever naming all those things which are “not-deer” – justice, rock, spirit, table – but one does not have, nor has anyone probably ever tried to contemplate the whole list of the “not-deer,” in order to understand “deer” has a limited application about the world outside ourselves.  In other words (no pun intended, well somewhat not intended), we operate with the understanding the word “deer” applies to only a very limited group of elements in the world, and the limitation is based on a specific criteria – a criteria which is, significantly, composed of more words.

It is important to note, for the purposes of this discussion, that even parts of the deer itself compose the things which are “not-deer.”  For example “deer leg,” and most people would imagine a deer with at least one leg when they read or hear the word (and I would assume that most people imagine a deer with all four legs as is the most common deer seen by people), is something which composes the deer, can be seen as subset of the deer.  Yet when I mention a deer at a stream, one does not imagine just a deer leg laying beside a stream (or at least I would hope not).  We agree that in general the deer has a leg or two or four legs, but the word “deer” relates to other deer parts or elements, without which it would no longer be a deer, but instead, a “deer leg” or a “deer antlers. ”

At the same time, and here is where things start to get a little complicated (complex?), it is possible that deer is unfortunately born with out legs.  A sad mutation, maybe caused by the nuclear reactor built just outside the nature preserve.  Even without the legs, we would still refer to the being as a “deer,” even though we would be compelled to usually to qualify the term “deer” with “who lacks all its legs.”  So while we generally (normally) imagine a deer as having all four legs, we also can agree that a deer can still be a deer even without all for legs. 

I bring up the “deer leg” example in part because it is related to another example.  Long ago when I was a child, I saw a television show in which a soldier awoke to find one of his legs had been amputated because of wounds.  What I remember is the man immediately becoming very upset and claiming he was no longer a real man.  I have come across similar examples in real life of this which point to the same situation: the soldier had a particular definition of what constituted a man.  Part of this definition, which he probably did not think about specifically, was that being a man meant having both legs (yes, I know he was a fictional character, but he represents actual people who are not fictional).  He probably never thought the actual thought “I need both legs to be a man,” rather he had some image in his head, some notions about what a man is suppose to be capable of doing, and these images and notions required, at least at first thought in his mind, having two functional legs.

What is also important to this example is that he did not think, since he was no longer a man, he was now a woman.  (If he was a sexist he may have thought he was now helpless like a woman).  When we think about binary thoughts, we tend to focus on binaries like man and woman or good and evil.  But these kinds of binary thinking are, in a sense, the next level.  Instead, the man without a leg was in his opinion “not-man.”

This, of course, leads to a state of disorientation – a key anchor of the identity has been lost.  The soldier who has lost a leg is now in what one can refer to as a liminal space – as I discussed in a previous blog.  Usually it doesn’t take long to find a new anchor for the identity, the replacement, such as “cripple.”  In the story, the soldier was able to eventually come to the realization that he could be missing a leg and still be a “man,” but this was only accomplished after some serious therapy.  (As an example of the importance of this dynamic, I have posited before that the intense hatred and violence that derives from it exhibited by homophobes is driven by this identity disorientation – specifically centered on what being a “man” means)

The identity disorientation example above is not meant to imply that this man or those similar to him base their identity solely on his gender or sex (elaborating on the difference between the two is not for this blog).  There is a plethora of other anchors around which the mind grounds the sense of “I” of the individual.  Soldier would be one in this example.  Maybe “Christian” or “father” or “Red Sox fan” could act as such an anchor.  “Son” would most definitely be one. The point here is not to identify all of the particular anchors, but that in each particular anchor there is the corresponding “not-particular anchor.” (to note: one shouldn’t confuse something like “not-son” with what one considers a bad “son.”)

In spite of the plethora of identity anchors, there is at the same time the global sense of “I,” and, thus the corresponding “not-I.”  One immediately gets into a messy wrinkle when one considers that for most of us (in good part driven by our nature to be social creatures) to consider one or more (usually more) anchors to be some group of people.  One example of this is what is refer to as that sense of belonging to a particular nation (I discuss the nation facet in previous blog regarding my professor Dr. Sugar).  In this regard, the self-identity reaches out to a larger entity within which the physical body is merely a part.  Since the consciousness itself is tied to the physical body and one’s identity, we get the added wrinkle (and debate) of the collective consciousness. (We can also get the cognitive dissonance that comes from believing one is both an autonomous entity while also seeing one’s self as part of a larger whole).

With that said, the individual’s identity can be to a function of the both those elements which provide the grounding for the identity and those elements that compose the “not-I” We need to keep mind each specific element has its corresponding “not-specific element,” each specific element can be a function of other elements (and on and on), and itself be an element that along with other elements create a larger element (and on and on).  This is complexity at its finest.  And is a way of point out that the mind (consciousness, and the un(sub)consciousness) operates as a complex adaptive system.

A key facet of the identity as a consequence is the identity which results from this complex adaptive system is an emergent feature – and, therefore, should not be seen as the sum of the parts.  The various elements influence each other in an intricate and dazzling display of feedback loops.  An individual’s understanding of who this “I” is emerges a result of the interplay between the elements that compose its identity, the interplay between the elements that compose the “not-I,” and the interplay between the “I” and “not-I.”

Sometimes the shifting, continuous emergence is subtle, almost unnoticeable.  Other times, a significant shift in one or more elements can cause dramatic, even traumatic, shifts in the “I” and “not-I.”  Much of this trauma is driven by our need to perceive these identities as stable, concrete identities, rather than unfolding constructs.  We couldn’t get through day, attending to the tasks and demands our lives present us if we were continuously focused on how we were constructing our selves and the world.

Yet we can get locked into this coping technique, in a sense clinging to the idea that the ideas of our selves and world are not mental construct.  Our need for stability of the “I” and “not-I” makes us like the deer sniffing the wind attempting to discover whether the smell indicates danger or not-danger. 

And nothing threatens that stability like a good ole political discussion. As I stated, we cannot really help but approach such a discussion looking through our binary perspectives, with the (un)stable I and not-I at the center of it all.

I bring all of this up because there is everything at stake in these discussions. It is not going out on a limb to assert that most of us are not satisfied with the current state of things – either the status quo is not acceptable or there is seen as too many threats to the status quo.  Nor would it be going out on a limb to assert that the only way to move toward a more satisfactory state of things (which is of course itself a massive unfolding complex adaptive system – but that is another story) is through a dramatic shift in the collective paradigm of the people in this country.

And when we talk about a dramatic shift in the collective paradigm, we are talking about dramatic shifts in how we individually define the I and the not-I (and the inter-related elements).  Sometimes these shifts can occur with the individuals kicking and screaming all the way (if they occur at all – sometimes just waiting for the passing of a generation or two).

Yet if we are to achieve this shift in our life times (and I’m not holding my breath) we need to avoid locking into the simple stable binary approach.  We need at times to embrace the more complex unstable systems framework, acknowledging the constructed nature of our identity and thus our (ever changing) understanding of the world, our selves, and the relationship between the two.  We need to learn to risk the disorientation that comes from momentarily finding ourselves without our normal anchors.  Only in this way can we consciously be active participants in the unfolding to something better.