Dichotomy to Bifurcation: Our Evolving Nation Part Two

Bifurcation Blues

When I published Dichotomy or Bifurcation Part One over a year ago I wrote that up next would be Part Two, concerning the concept of Bifurcation. If you are familiar with the Meyers-Briggs Personality Type instrument, I am an off the scale INTP. One of our endearing characteristics is that we tend to work like the devil to make sense out of a project, documenting our progress as we go along, then when we get a pretty clear idea of our "end game" or "completion phase"--- just sort of wander off. At least that's my excuse.

As it turns out, this is probably a more appropriate time for that blurb than then was. Part One was written several months before our last Presidential election, and I am not going to change anything I wrote then, primarily because I think events since that time have supported the concepts therein. I have written elsewhere about the development of God Terms. As our democratic nation gradually evolved into the so called two party system the god term that described its functionality were the magic words "checks and balances". That is the checks and balances governing the two party's interactions kept the government running smoothly- in chaos terms, a steady state system. As the system aged and the procedures became more ritualistic than innovative the energy expended in the system gradually shifted from system direction to blocking the other sides effectiveness. [Again, explained in much more detail elsewhere on this site.] Viewing this inter party interaction as a fractal, it approximates the same developmental evolution as the original two party system of government- each party's effect on the course of the other becomes less and less effective. Since the last presidential election, this convulsive declination of our government's ability to actually govern has reached a true apex of banality and is now manifested as complete idiocy: Chaos.

There have long, perhaps always, been diverse groups of people not associated with each other in any formal organizational sense, in fact often violently antagonistic to each other, who share nothing in common but a way of processing information. That is they all have some mental apophthegm that automatically, unconsciously, filters all incoming information. In general terms these folks can be classified as prejudicial, fanatical, paranoid, bleeding hearts, possessed, jesus freaks, doomsayers, rednecks, and a whole bunch of other terms that basically means that when these persons are targeted by data from damn near any source it is perceived in that persons consciousness only after it has passed through the filter of that individuals apophthegm. Generally these groups have been largely composed of individuals less educated or successful in terms of social status. As a whole they seldom have much real power, but they are loud. And they also typically have a charismatic leader or leaders or some other unquestionable source from whom they derive their embarras de richesses of god terms and absolute certainties. Rather than just to fill in the seats and shout slogans they have judiciously memorized or written on a crib note, they have also served to push forward the most extreme elements of their groups aspirations . In the past this allowed their leaders to publically espouse a less virulent point of view and to distance themselves from the dirty work.

In another of my cognitive leaps from nowhere to nowhere else, the trickle down economic scenario that Ronald Regan envisioned would seem to do as a metaphorical device. You remember that the benefits of wealth were to gradually trickle down to the grateful plebeian level once the coporateristocracy were left to operate without government restrictions. But it was not just the money that was supposed to trickle down. The superior ethical and moral standards of the productive sector of society was also expected to bring enlightenment to the unproductive bottom layers, those whom through laziness or cheating depended on society to meet their needs through handouts. So along with the trickle down opportunities for financial success the lower classes were to develop an enriched sense of responsibility and gain self respect as well as wealth by mimicking the work ethics of the superior class. But things didn't work out that way. Rather than act like a conduit for beneficial seepage, the moral structure of society operated more like a capillarity system. Both the real and the imagined desire of the lower classes to get something for nothing, rather than diminish, gradually began to creep up the social structure. Long story short (this is after all just a metaphor) the top got greedier and greedier. Eventually the multi million dollar CEO's and the Bernie Madoffs became victims of their own unrestricted adventures (colloquially known as a house of cards), and the whole system came crashing down. Actually in one sense the former system was more stable, at least one can buy real food with food stamps, but you can't buy jack shit with a trainload of illusional derivatives.

Similarly the ratio cognoscendi of the smarter, better educated, more successful echelons of our society; those possessing the expertise necessary to develop and maintain a steady state societal structure, were expected to develop, digest, simplify and pass on a greater understanding of our operations as a nation to the average dolt on the street. [can you say run on sentence?] The anticipated downward and outward flow of wisdom not only failed to materialize just as had the financial fairy tales, but also has led to what I believe is perhaps one of the most dangerous forces in our society----the blind acceptance of sheer leadership stupidity. Now this statement, standing alone, does require a bit of a caveat. Obviously, the very concept of organizational structure implies differing levels of knowledge, abilities, and responsibilities. Clearly nothing could happen if full knowledge and agreement had to be universal before movement occurred. So there needs to be some level of trust in leadership without knowing all the details. And one aid in building that trust led to the development of god terms, at one level a way of communicating large amounts of information with concision and clarity. But god terms become worthless when they are viewed as full explanations of multi level concepts, rather than stepping stones to understanding. Didn't happen. God terms can and largely have become linguistic's black holes. Once uttered , once they are accepted as actual descriptions of complex issues, all thought stops, and citizenship duties are ignored. And that is sad enough, but this mental laziness, rather than abating has worked its way clear to the top of our societal organization.

Never before in the history of our nation, perhaps even the history of the world have so many people of influence, talk show hosts, TV personalities, commentators, scholars. Judges, politicians (the full circle, no more left and right), preachers, Tea Party participants, ex vice presidents, election losers and winners, and on and on, bombarded society with such a Brobdingnagian effluvium of pure unadulterated stupid horse shit. Never. Used to be a phrase tossed around "knee jerk liberal"--- well what we got right here in River City folks is a pandemic of knee jerk stupidity. If you don't believe that, then try to recall a cogent argument, with relevant and reasoned discussion of any governmental topic in the last two years. Or, you can just disagree and/or think I am the pot calling the kettle black. But for my purposes- 'nuff said 'bout that.

As probably no one will recall, my excuse for attempting to apply complex scientific issues to every day real life goes like this. The ability to design and build a flashlight involves procedures and knowledge above that of most people. But the value of these complex procedures is easy enough for all of us to judge. Get in a dark room holding a flashlight. Switch it on. If you see light the scientific principles have been applied correctly. If you don't, they ain't.

So, as a dilettanteish refresher of some concepts from chaos theory: You recall that early on in the emergence of chaos theory Edward Lorenz attempted to write a computer program that could accurately predict the weather for an extended period. During one trail of his program, he made some infinitesimal and surely inconsequential changes while entering data for his next run. Rather than duplicate, or almost so, the results of his previous run as Lorenz expected, all hell broke loose. Lorenz soon realized that long term weather predictions were impossible because of "extreme sensitivity to initial conditions" which produced unknowable results simply because the exact initial conditions could never be known, much less duplicated. This concept had been earlier forwarded by a southern comedian name of Brother Dave Gardner who in reply to an audience members request to "do that again", said "I can't, I can do something similar".

For a while the future of expectations looked pretty grim, if the tiniest change could lead to totally bizarre results, how could we ever be certain of anything? A flake of dandruff falling from an angel's locks had the potential to destroy the universe. A few researchers noticed that something unusual did seem to be operative in the boundary between order and chaos. They observed that in the complex areas of the graphs they were producing, a series of events took place that came to be called period doubling. A steady data stream would bifurcate into two streams, then suddenly jump to four streams, then 8, then16... however they were unable to find a mathematical relationship between these bifurcation events.

Fortunately we were given a slight reprieve from hopeless paranoia by one Mitchell Feigenbaum. Mitchell's big breakthrough came with the realization that while the relationship seemed to be invisible numerically, it could be seen geometrically. In a data stream bound for chaos, the first bifurcation of two related but different data streams would be followed by a period of time when the system looked like two steady state streams, even with the occasional blip, only to suddenly split again into four streams of data. As these data streams continued to double, the period between bifurcations became shorter and shorter. Perceptually, if one looks down a railroad track, the tracks seem to grow closer and closer together as the distance increases, and Mitchell realized that the same thing was happening to the spaces (iteration sequences) between period doublings. Geometric convergence meant that something orderly was being preserved while everything around it was becoming chaotic.
Feigenbaum initially calculated that bifurcation doubling occurred at a ratio that approached the irrational number 4.669. The amazing thing Feigenbaum found was that the constant value applied to other formulas that exhibited period doubling
characteristics. Even when he moved from simple one dimensional equations describing animal populations to complex differential equations describing the transition to turbulence in a stream of liquid, he found the same ratio applied to the time between period doublings. Indeed Feigenbaum had developed a universal constant that now bears his name, joining the esteemed ranks of constants right along with pi and the golden ratio. The path to chaos was not an instantaneous random leap from one state to another, but a well ordered, progressive transition from the expected path following ever more frequent precision doublings until the data trail disappeared into the tangled mess of chaos.

Chaos Theory is still a very young science and new perspectives and equations are constantly under development. In fact there is not yet a universal definition of chaos itself, and scientists are limited to studying aspects found in chaotic systems. Apparently some systems with extreme sensitivity to initial conditions are not chaotic. Some students of chaos state in addition to extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, that a chaotic system requires a dense collection of periodic orbits and must be topologically transitive. As with other recent developments in theoretical science, such as string theory, even if they are absolutely correct, their affects cannot be demonstrated under conditions that can be observed and utilized in typical everyday life. As a consequence much of the way we have traditionally viewed the "laws of nature" is way out of date, upon which subject I hope to pontificate later.

1. The initial line on the graph should be pictured as representing everything (including us, we the people) involved with our government during a segment of time. The very center of that single line represents the strange attractor around which all elements of government cluster. Everything within range of the attractor is contained in the strange attractor basin, that is all activities of the government are directly related to and dependant on other activities, whether supportive or countervailing. But regardless of the intensity of the interactions (the Civil War, for example) and periods of instability, the strange attractor basin (government structure) continues to press onward as a steady state system- notwithstanding the occasional wobble.

2.   Area two on the chart has been officially labeled by the leading researchers as the WTF Moment. At some point these internal perturbations, rather than settle back into the main stream begin to engage in activities not governed by the previous status, and begin to accumulate around a new attractor. Eventually the initial data streams morph into two data streams seemingly moving in related but different directions. These two data streams can be viewed as new steady state systems. Not all bifurcations lead to total chaos.   Many bifurcated systems stabilize. As well as we can measure they remain singularly distinctive possibly permanently, which is the way we like to view our world. Our solar system can be viewed as a bifurcation evolving out of a previous WTF Moment of universal instability and while it is not really, really permanent, it has been and most likely will continue to be a steady state system for the duration of our species. (Let our successors worry about that, we have enough troubles of our own.)

3. To illustrate this process in more detail, consider one segment of our governmental structure within line one----our sexual behavior standards. This has been one of the most active continuous dichotomies in our social structure. There were the god fearing oppugnants that wanted all things sexual to be hidden from view and limited to the single act of procreation in constant conflict with the hedonistic desires of the free love folks. For a long time the purity police held the most power and were capable of curtailing behavior of which they disapproved as well as to dictate harsh punishment for the transgressors. Tension between the two points of view eventually resulted in open rebellion, commonly called the sexual revolution. Many factors played a role in this growing permissiveness. Pioneer television shows like Laugh In and the Smothers Brothers treated censorship as a joke - a favorite activity was to create double entendres to pander to the hip folks while going over the heads of the square censors. Issues like free speech and civil rights aided by drugs, rock and roll, Masters and Johnson, Mort Saul, communes, etc. all contributed to the revolt against the repressive purity pushers. The historical evolution of these types of struggles has typically resulted in one side or the other gaining major control over the social structure and the defeated side eliminated or forced to go underground to try and regain strength.

But that did not happen here. Rather than go quietly back to their shielded sanctuaries the propriety pushers are stronger and shriller than ever. Evangelical Christianity is rapidly increasing, the Religious Right is now a major player in our politics. Conservative talk show hosts rule the airways. Zealous crusaders roam the hallways of government and the courts; more powerful, more determined to restrict societal mores than ever. But what effect are they having on sexual behavior? Zilch. Nada.

Porn is probably the fastest growing commodity in the world. No more discrete fading to black when the actors are preparing to engage in sexual intercourse, rather, the camera zooms in for a closer look. Sexual activists are no longer locked in a struggle with the purity police, they are oblivious to them. Obviously, the Internet greatly facilitated this split, but it did not create permissiveness or censorship. Whatever the causes, it is clear that restrictiveness and promiscuity no longer operate within the same strange attractor basin. They each have become essentially separate entities, bifurcated. Their struggles, their evolution are controlled by forces in their own "group", their separate strange attractor basins. The religious folks are focused on themselves, the growing disjunction between Christianity and Islam is becoming stage central.

As well, the sexual branch of the bifurcation is focused internally, unfazed by its former persecutors. Along with providing a secure venue for increased freedom of sexual expression, it also harbors destructive elements. Sexual exploitation, especially of children, permeates the cyber world. It enables pedophiles to slither out of their once secret dungeons and do business in the open market. The question is no longer whether pious sources can keep permissiveness in check, it is whether sexual participants can/will govern themselves.

4....4 Once these cascading bifurcations start rolling the system(s) can never return to its former state. This single example of sexual standards is of course just one tiny part of our system of government. Whether it is in fact a harbinger of governmental collapse cannot be measured or convincingly documented. But if our system of government is on the verge of chaos, and if the period doubling artifact is correct, we should be able to detect similar kinds of things happening in widely separated areas of our observable social structure. Are there areas of social structure that initially had two elements directly dependant on each other, that now seem to be operating independently, and that area of social structure is significantly changed because of that separation? We need to look no farther than our recent/current health care debacle. Once upon a time when the president made a request of congress the Republicans and Democrats would have at each other- sometimes it would seem like open warfare, sometimes one side or the other would gain enough overall support to get something passed, and on extremely rare and joyous occasions they would actually work cooperatively and come up with a bill to offer the president. But in the case of health reform they were like total strangers, the democrats huddled and schemed, the republicans huddled and schemed. Lack of bipartisanship seemed in fact to be an euphemism for something that looked much more like a bifurcation. Both parties huddled in their separate caves---- the democrats to fumble around in their typical timorous incompetence, and the republicans to march in meaningless just say no to everything lockstep.

On a larger scale the same sort of shift is taking place in the genre of international hostilities. When two countries would go to war with each other, there were the open battles for control of ground, but historically there was often an accompanying process of secret hostile actions. Countries would frequently take such actions against other countries even without a declaration of war. They would send teams of spies and saboteurs into the enemies territory to sneak around and cause whatever damage they could. For whatever reason these actions, especially those that were taken against non military sites, were seldom admitted, and deniability was an essential part of such operations. Somewhere along the line, and I didn't bother to look it up, actions of this ilk acquired the label terrorism, which morphed into the term state sponsored terrorism, and that is where our analysis stopped, which has and is causing us to make some bad judgements. The behaviors we label terrorism have long since outgrown their obeisance to nation sponsorship. The mind set, the exponentially growing mind set, is not concerned with some particular nations interest leading to some material resolution, but is born and followed out of ideology. [Just as an aside, it is misleading to call this conflict a war. In a war there is the possibly of surrender, but there is no procedure for the surrender of one's beliefs.]

Similar separations of previously interacting elements seems to me to be wide spread. [To add to my ad nauseam caveats about my intended role, I am not trying to fashion some idiosyncratic device to persuade you to see things my way. If genres within our purview are indeed splitting up into non interactive elements, you should be able to observe those activities for yourself- have at it, or not ]. But I think it is unquestionably clear that our government is not operating with the purpose and progress it once did. Does that necessarily mean that our system of government is seriously in danger of collapsing? For my "just saying", I rhetorically imagine you asking me--- can our government, our social structure, our basic way of life be repaired? Can we the people put enough pressure on our government to force it to pull itself up by the bootstraps and get our nation back on the path to becoming the truly great nation we once were? I think the chances for that happening are roughly equivalent to that of a snowball in hell. Our derangements are far more pervasive than can be assuaged by whomever we elect president, or which party has the most members in congress. But that's just me.

Documenting that process in real life is obviously impossible even with the most advanced levels of scientific methods and technology. But if the process of becoming chaotic really does apply to human organization we should be able to get some sense of its progress even if we can't measure it or even prove its existence. We are already prepared with a suitable godterm- " things are going to hell in a handbasket".