On 01/20/2014 12:39 PM, Jochen Fromm wrote: > > http://blog.cas-group.net/2013/07/fascism-and-cancer/
Great post! But, as usual, the metaphor prevents me from thinking more than it helps me to think. It seems fairly obvious to me that cancers are failures at the cellular scale. (Am I wrong?) The coarser and finer constructs are all useful mechanisms that only go bad when the cell scale goes wonky. In order to make this metaphor between totalitarianism and cancer into a useful thinking tool, we have to identify the analog of the cellular scale within the totalitarian system. Does the cell map to the individual? ... if not, then what? If we push the metaphor, I would argue that the humans that constitute totalitarian regimes are _normal_ humans. The merged sub-systems that you're mapping to tumors aren't (to my mind) like tumors at all. They're more like resonant frequencies than misgrown tissues. This brings us back to Arlo's concept of kindling homogenously strapped to the handle of an ax. It's a systemic pattern that, if broken, could snap back to a healthy regime. That's definitely not the case with cancer. Just breaking the resonant pattern so that the cells can float around amongst the their healthy brethren won't do much good at all, and would probably make things much worse. But I suppose you could counter with the idea that the individuals who have been _trained_ by a resonant frequency like capitalism are (over time) broken/damaged by that coarser forcing structure. But I think the cause vs. effect is flipped for the two systems, making the analogy fail in an important way. In one the resonant structure causes the broken individual. In the other, the broken individual causes the neoplasm. -- ⇒⇐ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
