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tedmitewOn energy loss in a system
Every system is in its essence a network of actors that perform it from moment to moment into existence. The participants in the system, or actors in the network, enact and perform it through their daily routine operations. Some of these routine operations are beneficial to the system being performed, and some are not. Some add to the energy of the system and therefore reduce entropy, while others take away from that energy and increase entropy. If the former outweigh the latter, we can say t...
tedmitewOn empathy
Empathy, generated with Stable DiffusionHere's a thought. High empathy is the most essential element of a culture or civilization in its prime, and the absence of empathy is the most important marker of a collapsing culture or society. There is a moment in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game where the character Colonel Graf must explain why he chose the main protagonist Ender instead of one of his siblings as the commander of the human fleet to face an alien invasion. The colonel e...
tedmitewManagement entropy and the Red Queen Trap
I had an interesting conversation about my essay on the Red Queen Trap with someone on LinkedIn, and it made me think about something I did not explain in the essay. In an ideal environment each element of a system will be acting rationally and striving towards its own preservation and, by extension, the preservation of the system. Rational action here can be understood as the action resulting in optimal energy efficiency from a given number of viable options, where optimal energy efficiency ...
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tedmitewCognitive mercantilism
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tedmitewCognitive mercantilism
tedmitewOn energy loss in a system
Every system is in its essence a network of actors that perform it from moment to moment into existence. The participants in the system, or actors in the network, enact and perform it through their daily routine operations. Some of these routine operations are beneficial to the system being performed, and some are not. Some add to the energy of the system and therefore reduce entropy, while others take away from that energy and increase entropy. If the former outweigh the latter, we can say t...
tedmitewOn empathy
Empathy, generated with Stable DiffusionHere's a thought. High empathy is the most essential element of a culture or civilization in its prime, and the absence of empathy is the most important marker of a collapsing culture or society. There is a moment in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game where the character Colonel Graf must explain why he chose the main protagonist Ender instead of one of his siblings as the commander of the human fleet to face an alien invasion. The colonel e...
tedmitewManagement entropy and the Red Queen Trap
I had an interesting conversation about my essay on the Red Queen Trap with someone on LinkedIn, and it made me think about something I did not explain in the essay. In an ideal environment each element of a system will be acting rationally and striving towards its own preservation and, by extension, the preservation of the system. Rational action here can be understood as the action resulting in optimal energy efficiency from a given number of viable options, where optimal energy efficiency ...
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In his Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism Robert Jay Lifton gives the following interesting definition of the language of a totalist environment [p.429]:
The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. […] [B]rief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed […] become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.
In other words, the preponderance of thought-terminating cliché phrases such as ‘agree to disagree’, ‘it’s all relative’, ‘this is hate-speech’, ‘these are the facts’, ‘[authority figures] all agree’, ‘this is [x] privilege’, ‘that’s your opinion’ is a symptom of being in a totalist environment.
A totalist environment is characterized by fully synthetic thinking, itself a function of a dynamic milieu control of information. In an environment of dynamic milieu control, certain information inputs – phrases, words, images, feelings – are branded as undesirable and banned from circulation. This in turn means that any and all thoughts associated with these information inputs become undesirable and dangerous.
In effect, synthetic thinking, as modulated by milieu control, acts to remove undesirable wrong-think and wrong-speech from all downstream communication feedback loops. Importantly, this is a self-reinforcing mechanism which, over time, generates an equally synthetic, and total, image of reality.
When consistently performed at scale over a given time-space, the causal chain of milieu control >> synthetic thinking >> synthetic reality leads to the emergence of cognitive mercantilism. Cognitive mercantilism is the systemic and dynamic formatting of the cognitive processing of a given local reality [i.e. a country], as directed by the actors in control of the communication mechanism of that local reality [i.e. the state].
This is how this maps to the historical process so far:
local mercantilism [tribal/feudal state] >> colonial mercantilism [empire/colonial state] >> [pseudo] liberal colonialism [we are here] >> cognitive mercantilism
In his Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism Robert Jay Lifton gives the following interesting definition of the language of a totalist environment [p.429]:
The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. […] [B]rief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed […] become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.
In other words, the preponderance of thought-terminating cliché phrases such as ‘agree to disagree’, ‘it’s all relative’, ‘this is hate-speech’, ‘these are the facts’, ‘[authority figures] all agree’, ‘this is [x] privilege’, ‘that’s your opinion’ is a symptom of being in a totalist environment.
A totalist environment is characterized by fully synthetic thinking, itself a function of a dynamic milieu control of information. In an environment of dynamic milieu control, certain information inputs – phrases, words, images, feelings – are branded as undesirable and banned from circulation. This in turn means that any and all thoughts associated with these information inputs become undesirable and dangerous.
In effect, synthetic thinking, as modulated by milieu control, acts to remove undesirable wrong-think and wrong-speech from all downstream communication feedback loops. Importantly, this is a self-reinforcing mechanism which, over time, generates an equally synthetic, and total, image of reality.
When consistently performed at scale over a given time-space, the causal chain of milieu control >> synthetic thinking >> synthetic reality leads to the emergence of cognitive mercantilism. Cognitive mercantilism is the systemic and dynamic formatting of the cognitive processing of a given local reality [i.e. a country], as directed by the actors in control of the communication mechanism of that local reality [i.e. the state].
This is how this maps to the historical process so far:
local mercantilism [tribal/feudal state] >> colonial mercantilism [empire/colonial state] >> [pseudo] liberal colonialism [we are here] >> cognitive mercantilism
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