gnothi seauton — the inscription over the temple of the oracle at Delphi; “know thyself”
I laid in bed awake until 4:30 and thought great thoughts that boil down to these two questions:
- are your relationships synergistic?
- do your synergies yield wholeness?
All based on Euclid’s definition of ratio in the elements
Which centers around two words – one with many diverse meanings, one very obscure. that was from my St JoHn’s College senior essay but what it means is that certainty is in doubt by both causes of uncertainty – information overload, and information scarcity. How can we be sure of what Euclid meant? It is a mystery.
When faced with a mystery people do one of two things: they explore the mystery, or they redefine it to match something that isn’t mysterious. Can you guess which one is more frequent? hint: it leads to ‘conventional wisdom’, consensus, and status quo.
Yeah. So I re-translate the definition of ratio from: “a ratio is a sort of relation in respect of size between two magnitudes of the same kind” to: “a logos is two measures alike in their state of wholeness”
The difference between pieces and wholes is the important part. A ratio is the comparison between two things with respect of wholeness
Which isn’t much more clear, but leads you into different conclusions whether you use pattern matching or try to explore the mystery and for interpersonal relationships, seeking and valuing wholeness really changes the dynamics something that we just don’t get.
Then you dump a good dose of Bucky Fuller on it, who incidentally rejected the notion of scarcity as a natural condition in a free market along the way to coming up with synergetics, which is both a mathematics, and a social ideology, the basic statement of which is:
2+2 > or = 5A little bit of fast and loose set theory will let you conjecture that the logical statement, “some synergies yield wholeness” is True, which you can relate back to Fuller’s descriptions of positive synergies (as opposed to negative synergies) and correlate to real results – mishandled corporate mergers come to mind as good examples of where you would expect greater benefits, in the form of the reduction of the illusion of scarcity and the rise in happiness of those involved, but get the opposite
Which gets you back to the two questions. In any context – corporate, business, personal – are your relationships synergetic? (do they produce more than the sum of their parts?) and do your synergies yield wholeness (are the synergetic effects positive and unifying?)
gnothi seauton
People, whether they know it or not, are seeking synergetic wholeness, but capitalism is seeking to maximize profit by inducing scarcity. They are fundamentally incompatible first principles and doomed from the start. Nothing new there.
What does it mean to say inducing scarcity?
Well, if Fuller is right, and scarcity is artificial in sufficiently well connected free market networks, then every connection should reduce scarcity for both nodes A links to B in a particular context, and both A and B should no longer have to compete for resources in that context. And because of that, Nash’s non-zero sum rules come into effect to modify Smith – win-win situations are now possible.
But, if B is intentionally positioning themselves to hoard the resources, they are, in physics terms, creating a gravitational attraction for that resource that is disproportional to their mass. What that does is change the relationship A:B because B is reducing their amount of wholeness, the sameness of which is, of course, the basis of the relationship. They are no longer, in the traditional sense, magnitudes of the same kind. Wholeness, in the right market situations having to do with connected-ness, capacity to produce, and free-ness, becomes the quality of willingness to non-compete over artificial scarcity. In other words, collaboration.
Inducing scarcity is the effect or consequence or means of competition in those same market conditions (sufficiently well-connected free-market networks) and it un-makes relationship A:B such that synergetic wholeness cannot exist, ultimately destroying one or all of the market’s connected-ness, capacity to produce, or free-ness.
Saying that just dismisses a whole bunch of well regarded economic theory, huh?
Ratio is two measures alike in their state of wholeness.