The other morning, my friend D and I were going through the morning rituals and listening to The Utopia of Rules by David Graber, when something in the audiobook caught my attention and evoked the following reflection…
The following article was recorded in real-time on audio file and later transcribed by the OpenAI voice to text transcription protocol, Whisper.
“So I wanted to reflect on that because he's talking about this dichotomy between anarchy and rule-binding, right? Follow that?”
- Okay.
Okay, so the trick is that there's a dynamism and stasis polarity, right? Something in motion, something fixed.
In physics, we talk about the uncertainty principle, where you can't actually know; You can't know the fixed location of a certain subatomic particle at the same time that you can know its dynamic motion.
The two are mutually exclusive.
You can have one or you can have the other.
But at the level of physics, you don't actually get to have those things together.
You have to oscillate, choosing moment to moment which of those data points you want to accent.
In the view of awareness as the fundamental primary, that everything that we are aware of is constituted of awareness and can't be reduced further, we have the mirror similar phenomena, which is the phenomenon of form and emptiness.
Everything has a form that we are present to in the moment.
And the moment you investigate any one of those forms, there's nothing there.
It's empty.
Like awareness nested on awareness.
…And it's emotion.
…And so anyway.
So, the definition of philosophy and definition of social order has to do with the individual awareness seeking to obtain some measure of constancy in the capacity to develop a skill to respond.
So, I don't want to develop a skill to respond to a circumstance and then come to the same circumstance or something similar enough that a part of me wants to hold it in stasis and call it the same and have to reinvent a brand new response every time.
And I want stability because I want to be able to know where my food is.
I want to know, like, when I go back to my bed, it's there and I can fall down and sleep in it.
Right? So, you know, I want to know that that's my safe parent.
I want to know that that's where I can go for safety.
I want to know that that's my mate.
Whatever it is, I want to know that all these kind of fundamental biological constants, (and constants is a funny word to use here) that build up this proclivity to seek stasis, to seek clarity, to seek precision, to seek a persistent function, a persistent normalcy.
And so, in the seeking of this, we develop these rule structures and we develop these role structures where you are the caregiver, I depend on you to get up.
Right? You are the president, I depend on you to make the decisions.
You are the soldier, I depend on you to shoot the enemies.
Like, whatever is the role, we “need” some constancy.
A person can come in and out of the role, but the role better fucking hold still.
- Right.
The rule better hold still.
Like, the context can change, but something needs to persist.
- Part of the game.
Yeah, that's part of the, you know, that philosophical view that sees the cosmos as a game, right?
- Right.
There's something, something persists yet.
You know, it is that of substance.
And so, as I'm looking at this through the lens of practical philosophy, like, how shall we better be a species that doesn't self-terminate by terminating our environment? How shall we be an earthen body experimenting with multiplicity of form that doesn't decay itself in catastrophic ways?
Maybe catastrophic is a relative term, and there is no such thing.
And like, an earth explores itself in this way, and has what we as the experiment call a catastrophic failure, and yet it's another moment in eternity unfolding.
So anyway, so, we have to account for these kinds of far-out edges of phenomenal perception and experience and awareness in order to return to the present moment and identify practical social relations that can endure in conditions of collective challenge, a war, or a famine, or a flood, or a, you know, social evolution gone “business as usual to sleep” and starting to run over the biosphere, or whatever have.
And so, there has to be some practical collaboration here in Maya, in the world of illusion, where we actually pretend like we all have a consistent form, like we pretend like we have a consistent self, we pretend like we have a world and a society.
This game, right? With these pretends.
And so, there's something about the rule structure of my own identity and the recognition that you're going to have a rule structure of your own identity, but that neither of those actually can be measured for their rate and nature of change and their static reality at the same time.
But both will have those qualities, those both will have those wave /particle qualities, in their nature, in their expression, as they manifest.
And so, maybe there's a philosophy that has to do with the chaos nature of this phenomenal existence, where we recognize roles and identities and as sovereign (“as sovereign” meaning places of places of free choice about imposing self and context dynamism) that are strange attractors.
So in chaos theory we have this idea that like you don't have points in space so much as you have strange attractors that are probability fields and tendency spaces that have these qualities of attracting system dynamics to orbit in certain ways.
But they're not dependable as location specific, but they're generally predictable along certain constraints.
So anyway, I think there's something in there about how we understand social movements. And so, if I'm not defining rules that everyone should follow or even rules that I should follow, I establish instead strange attractors like honesty or care or integrity.
Strange attractors that I have to revisit in every instance of my life, where they play in this phenomenal expression and I have to respond to them and reapply my inquiry into each of those domains not my certainty.
I don't refer to the rules of the world.
I don't refer to the rulebook, but I refer to the inquiry.
And so we make something stasis that isn't actually ever fully definable but is recognized as a static strange attractor which will certainly and predictably evolve over time but will be tested fresh in moment to moment existence.