Israel: a grassroots perspective

Israel moves into Gaza. As it hammers home its frustration with Palestinian attacks on its population there are world-wide protests proclaiming their solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Of course there are the official announcements, the commentators, the lines we are fed through the media. Although cynics may differentiate between society on one side and its leaders on the other, in this case on both sides the two are largely at one.

Knowing Israel and knowing the Middle East another picture presents, a view from the grassroots that tells the story somewhat differently.

Just as individuals can be identified by their particular characteristics, so can demographics and societies. Societies do differ from each other, sometimes less, sometimes more so. And just as the social dynamics among individuals can be observed, so can their counterparts at a larger scale.

Put one person into a confined space with another and innate differences have the potential to create problems simply because each other's way of life cannot find a common ground. This equally holds true at the higher scale.

Israeli society is marked by centuries of a maturing culture that developed into a sophisticated whole where remnants of a more ideological and religious past have learned to coexist with modern sentiments. The old does exist, it does play a part, but a minor one.

The Middle East, Palestine included, did not evolve to the same extent. There traditional relationships between families, tribes, and obsessive affiliations of many kinds hold sway over daily affairs, all under the roof of a religion that infuses mannerisms to a degree hardly understood by outsiders.

The core of any religion - not its social graces but its spiritual aspect - is based on phantasy and conjecture. The core has become the soul of its bearers, at any scale. Since one's imagery must be reconciled with reality at some point, the mind has devised however subconscious means to circumvent the inevitable pitfalls. To put it crudely, it has become an expert liar to itself.

There more intense and the more pervasive the phantasy, the greater the need to lie in the face of reality.

Foreigners get a glimpse of such dynamics when engaging with the locals, whether it be a business venture or general social contacts. In the Middle East nothing is certain until the very last moment, and even then surprises can be sprung. A visitor to Israel experiences a more familiar, methodical, rational environment.

Israel does not have honour killings, precarious interactions with the opposite sex, the constant worry of transgressing a religious code hiding within some scenario. Children, indeed the general population has not been mixed indiscriminately with its militants.

At times a visitor may wonder why the constant bobbing of the head during a religious ceremony does not make anyone consider the effects on the brain, but most Jewish kids are exhorted to study and educate themselves. Try anything remotely critical in an Islamic society and suffer the consequences - better still, don't try.

Relax in a Tel Aviv café and admire the architecture of your surrounds, a modern product that found its way on to the world heritage list. A current achievement, unlike its Middle Eastern counterparts left over from a distant past. Talk, discuss, debate; then argue who pays for the coffee.

Is it any wonder the two sides cannot co-exist? But also observe who in the current climate rallies to the Palestinians' side. They are groups largely associated with constraint, impediment, anti-development. Greens, anti-Westerners, those that have lost the connection with the sophisticated here and now. Their affinities are telling.

And here is another thing. I am addressing myself to those who rather read a book than chase a ball, who rather have a serious conversation than shout the antics of a movie's rascal at each other. Every now and then these individuals will encounter the bully, who cannot stand anything above themselves and to whom civilised behaviour is anathema. The cultured victim will not lash out immediately, but resentment will build. Contrary to a certain popular misconception that intelligent people are weak, the response will come eventually. And when it does, naturally that act is out of proportion to the current provocation. Yet it also is effective, a characteristic alien to the bully. Who will be condemned? Not so much the bully, who yells and screams about the injustice of it all. Usually the bystanders will take his side, not bothering with the deeper reasons and the history of the moment. A sad set of circumstances that can be found in the school ground as well as in adult life. If at the larger scale the effects of a defensive action include the entire mishmash of civilians and children the screams become even louder. And the world sees the little faces but does not see the sadistic build-up.

Add the current Western preoccupation with the dysfunctional rather than achievement and a suffering drunk tends to get more attention than the difficulties of the disciplined. Let's not forget, one can get drunk from many things.

Israel does have a problem. Hamas is only part of it.

Hail the nanny state!

A few days ago the story of Hannah's parents went through the media.

Last October the two-year-old girl drowned in a swimming pool and since then her parents "lobbied vigorously" to strengthen the pool safety laws in Queensland. Pool owners face the compulsory installation of added locks and regular inspection by the authorities, all at their own expense and regardless of whether they have children of their own or not and whatever their age and swimming skills.

"Vicious hate mail" came their way, and state premier Anna Bligh was "shocked" at such a response.

Loosing one's child is tragic, but it is interesting no-one has touched upon the deeper reasons for the on-going attempts to impose more and more controls in our lives in such a general and pervasive manner.

One or two incidents of some kind are hardly a sign of a culture, but have the events multiply and there is reason to look more closely.

An unsupervised and untrained child drowns and everybody is meant to bear the consequences. An irresponsible driver fails to negotiate a curve and the Roads Department is lambasted for its negligence. Someone slips on a wet rock in a river and Parks and Wildlife Services are taken to court. A pedestrian trips over a kink in the footpath and the Council has to pay. Some people cannot handle their alcohol and the opening hours in the entire city are reduced.

See the common denominator?

Generally speaking, in the face of a potential danger one of two reactions is possible. Either the individual is held to account and leaned upon to be prepared, or the environment at large is modified to reduce the danger.

The question becomes, what is the overall cost in both cases? A danger might be so unforeseeable and complex that training everybody would be unfeasible and so the focus is on the threat itself. On the other hand, the act of preparing can be so trivial that individuals rather than society can be expected to take responsibility.

Clearly, in the examples above society at large has been forced to address the issue, with the added onus of needing organisational and administrative entities to cope with the extra burden - a measure individuals do not need. Therefore, a society in which each and every member is up to the task of daily life will have more resources at its disposal than one that assumes the role of general supervisor, guardian, and nanny.

The source of both approaches can readily be found in human existence, and for good reason. A child in its first few years does not have the capacity to understand the wider surrounds and needs protection, most immediately supplied by the mother – the female. Rather than expect the child to master every eventuality a mother will concentrate on the surrounds to make them safe. When the father – the male – takes over in later years the focus shifts to the child, to be trained and thus prepared for what is to come. Hence if a young child falls off a swing a mother seeks to change the swing, if an older child does the same a father changes the child.

Through feminism the female mindset has spread out from the home into society and with it carried the values and priorities of its bearers. As a consequence society has become the ‘home’ and its members have attained the status of ‘child’ in so many ways. No longer is it desirable to have strong and independent youngsters – they must play the role of children for as long as possible. No longer is the drive to adult life seen as a sign of vigour – it is being decried as irresponsible and being deprived of one’s childhood.

Just as a mother will always see the young boy in the grown man, so does society now view its members as children who need to be protected at all costs.

“If only one child is saved by...” has become the war cry of nannies of any ilk as soon as some measure is contemplated which yet again lowers the standards for us all. Nobody can, or dares, question the effect of such a sentiment. If out of 100 children one cannot manage a roundabout, does this mean all the other 99 must be dumbed down as well?

If out of 100 children one manages to find a questionable website, does that mean every ISP in the land needs to install filters? The idiosyncrasy becomes particularly poignant in cases like these: on one hand we – however grudgingly – admire the technical savvy of youngsters, yet on the other we impose limits on their inventiveness (whether these limits actually work is of course another matter again).

Now consider those dangers that do need a collective effort to counter; climate change, terrorism, scarcity of resources, population density come to mind. If we all run ourselves into the ground trying to sustain a female-friendly nursery, what then will be left to address the real problems – the ones outside the newly-pervasive ‘home’?

Even more to the point, societies which do not cater to the inward-looking narcissism to the same extent are better placed to pursue their intents. While the West drowns in its self-imposed navel-gazing they in turn fulfill their ambitions at will.

While we pledge obeisance to the eternal Mother, they are free to take advantage of our weakness.

The Schopenhauer dilemma

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

This famous quote by Schopenhauer speaks, like all the others, of the man's experience with life.

A good phrase inveigles itself into the mind through its seductive power. A splendid phrase holds up even under examination.

When an author writes beautifully the lean sentence has an allure a volume of words cannot match. Like a simple but haunting melody the few tones stand for so much, unsaid.

Yet to delve more deeply often reveals such detail that the audience runs the risk of having its own visions curtailed against the intention of the writer.

What stands for truth has been the subject of endless arguments, from antiquity to the present. Let us not dwell on the false authority of religion, nor on the obsession of ideologues. Let us simply say that truth represents what, at any given moment, can be shown to mirror reality. No more, but certainly no less.

Since its completion in 2003 the Otoom model of the mind has proven itself against hundreds of events around the world. Almost a thousand references in the book itself and over two hundred mentioned in the Parallels attest to that (see the website). A small truth here, a small truth there, they all add up.

Why then the opposition, why the reluctance to engage?

In general a newly arrived truth, even a small one, competes with the established. By its very definition it is a sentiment not shared by anyone aligned with the familiar. For something new to take hold it has to replace the old, and the old has become comfortable through sheer habit.

That applies at any scale, but consider the mystery of the mind. For millennia thinkers have confronted the inescapable question how humans formulate thoughts, generate ideas, and arrive at insights. In modern times the theologians and philosophers were joined by researchers focusing on society, on cognition, right up to artificial intelligence. Just as nobody came up with a comprehensive picture, many offered hypotheses built upon what to them seemed plausible under their own circumstances.

From a mysterious and all-powerful creator, to the multitude of actions throughout society, to the abstracts of mental dynamics, to computer-based neural networks, they all were seen as a promising entrance to what we perceive as the Mind, that vast and inscrutable system.

Fancy has given way to science, but even here this elusive phenomenon provided more questions than answers in the end. And so in our times the debates became occasions for a form of mutual commiseration.

I may present my view, but in the absence of a conclusive solution my own version is no better or worse than anyone else's in the end. The discussions came to enjoy a conviviality born out of a shared frustration with the real, and the participants could repeat the exercise happy in the knowledge that no-one else would destroy their own artifice either.

Such an atmosphere, such fun!

For a member of that club to undermine the reason for its very existence borders on the masochistic, or at least on the personality of a misanthrope.

Yet this is precisely what the Otoom model is asking. Except that the old stuffy comfort gets replaced by the bracing winds sweeping in from a land beckoning to be explored.

Then there is status.

Imagine walking down the street and a bedraggled individual emerges from the shadows, whispering the secrets of the universe. Would you stop and listen?

Or imagine an air-brushed fashion thing sprouts inanities from the front page. Would you toss away the paper?

Under ordinary circumstances a scientist can rely upon the credence their testamur bestows. The document represents commitment, effort, and success.

But what if the circumstances are outside the ordinary - what if, for reasons that need explaining, and sometimes in detail, the usual path had not been available?

Nothing would have changed in the content of a presented material, but the perception is now radically different. Not only is the material itself questioned, if dealt with at all the tendency exists to measure it against others which did in fact come from more acceptable sources. If found wanting in that regard the concept is criticised for being in neglect of the established; never mind that it may have nothing to do with it.

Familiarity, it has been said, breeds contempt. More often than not it also calcifies thinking.

One attribute of familiarity is norm, and it can manifest in insidious ways. Since the norm represents a standard, such markers can be used to preempt further investigation.

Although universities enjoy a respect they well deserve, as societal entities they are situated within the greater realm of their demographic. It is the demographic that determines the ultimate quality of their surrounds, the mindset that pervades the overall climate and therefore the nature of any outcome.

Universities create their own intellectual space but they are nevertheless part of the wider community. Should this community be prone to secrecy, should those who voice some concern be subjected to threats and censorship, should leaders rise through its ranks not because of their learning but due to some religious or ideological appeal resonating through the social strata, then the critic is seen as an iconoclast at best or an usurper at worst. Outsiders not familiar with such an ambience do not see the background but only the critic and so his or her actions are not taken seriously.

Yet Queensland society does fall into that category, and people in the rest of the country or abroad do not necessarily relate to what can happen here. For example, a surgeon who complained about health practises has been publicly gagged, a local member of parliament thinks the financial crisis has been foretold in the Bible, a doctor who warned of problems with the intended merger of two children's hospitals has been warned to stay out of this "or else" and has been put down as a "blow-in", and the state's education system is not only well below world standards but has high school teachers who literally can't spell.

I emphasise I am talking about the general ambience. Not everybody falls into the same class and there are notable exceptions. What the latter have to deal with in everyday life is anyone's guess, but if one does speak out the response is swift and brutal.

To nurture something like the Otoom model in such a climate is an interesting experiment in itself. Only time will tell us about the ultimate outcome and furnish the lessons learnt.

Otoom on Obama

They may not have danced in the streets as they did across America, but a collective sigh of relief ran through the governments around the world.

Becoming increasingly uncomfortable with local and foreign US policies, a John McCain raising the spectre of another hundred years in Iraq and his gun-slinging, moose-shooting comrade whose only difference between her kind and a pit bull, in her own words, was the lipstick, was viewed with alarm.

In an unprecedented move the twenty-seven member states of the European Union signed a letter to Barack Obama within hours of his election win urging him to take Europe seriously as a partner. The French foreign minister's words emphatically directed to "our American friends, not America" spoke volumes. The EU being slow and cumbersome? Not this time, baby.

Talking about a water shed, a new era, a seismic shift, are no exaggerations. The new wind is sensed by Obama's followers, by his opponents, and most of all by the man himself.

The outcome of these elections defined the break from the familiar as only a spectacle representing a nation of three hundred million can. But the undercurrent, the broad cultural river which carries the daily affairs along on its stream, did not really need that latest turn to define itself.

Human affairs are dynamics which demonstrate the growth of clusters, the emergence of new domains, their eventual branching away from their source, to enter a renewed cycle of assertion and growth. They can be observed at any scale at any time, only the size and the content changes.

The United States was the cultural child of Britain, coming from a broader European heritage and Anglo-Saxon parents. As any healthy child it eventually sought independence, fought for it, and won.

Just as independence brings freedom, it also puts distance between the former home and itself. The lack of direct access to maturity is balanced by a sense of adventure and the drive for a separate identity. The generations that followed filled that new space in the name of the youth now on a path towards finding himself. The lessons were hard, often disastrous, and many a times caused a shaking of heads at such naiveté.

Yet as powerful a conceptual tool as the functional perspective is, one must not overlook the content. In tandem with the growth came the developing composition of American society, broadly summarised in terms of its three main elements: the original Anglo-Saxon demographic, its Hispanic counterpart, and alongside African-Americans.

None had the benefit of growing up among its traditional cultural peers, all needed to forge a new self in a society as wild as it seemed unbounded. Under such circumstances anything can happen, and it virtually did.

While the Anglo-Saxons revelled in their self-defined power the Hispanics worked to gain their share, but neither possessed the sheer urgency to escape the tyranny imposed by an age of enslavement. Step by step the former slaves fought their way from the burnings, the lynchings, the separation.

This century saw the degeneration of the American ruling class, its foreign excesses and its anti-social greed grown locally but affecting all of us. In those broad terms the comfort of luxury was no match against the vigour that comes from knowing first-hand what it means to have nothing.

The results from a competition between the laid-back rich and the hungry lower class manifest sooner or later. At first no immigrant struggling in a chaotic neighbourhood can take on the establishment, and no labourer sweating on a plantation can even hope to offer serious resistance to his masters. Only gradually does the balance of power shift, but it does.

And now, what does the future hold for a nation that is coming to terms with its new identity?

Previous expansionism, a concept which tells not only of strength but also of further opportunities to test its still existing sense of adventure, is not an option for a system that seeks to consolidate itself. A more local view will replace it, a perspective that is more focused on internal affairs than the outside. With the evolution of the self comes confidence, a security that stems from beginning to understand the newly-gained self.

Whether the outcome will be measured by the degree of influence in world affairs, so familiar to a certain older generation, remains to be seen. Today's world is a different place from what it was a century ago. Surrounded by the age-old, self-sustaining cultures of Europe, China and India the new America will not only need to negotiate its way through sophisticated interpretations of a common reality, it will also have to draw on its still developing inner resources to grow a confidence in matters of perception.

Already there is talk of the Age of China, supplanting the Age of America. Islam poses a cultural threat going beyond the effects of localised acts of terrorism. And trade, that medium which controls and channels the wealth of individuals as well as nations, can be a source of power if based on real goods but can also lead to destruction when harnessed to contrived phantasies.

In the end race, skin or hair do not matter. It is the mind at any scale that defines its owner.

Dumbing down: ambiguity vs precision

Dumbing down can occur in many ways, some more insidious than others. One of the most dangerous forms relates to the misuse of ambiguity and precision.

To illustrate what I mean consider the following sentence, "Standing next to a passing express train is quite an experience".

The statement is evocative because it conveys the context of danger in a manner most can relate to. But why, and how?

It contains two elements that make it work, and they are opposite in nature: 'express train' and 'next'.

'Express train' defines in an unambiguous way; we understand the big heavy object, the speed and the power. Not every train can be called an express either, and so the phrasing is precise.

'Next' on the other hand is ambiguous, its scope of meaning quite extensive. Earth is next to Mars; I am living next to the city; in water the hydrogen atoms are next to each other.

Neither precision nor ambiguity are wrong as such, it depends how they are used. Suppose I change the above sentence to, "Standing 2.3 metres away from a passing express train is quite an experience". It doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it?

The statement needs the strictly defined object as the main reference, otherwise the reference itself negates its purpose. It also needs the wider scope of the spatial configuration. Not because a distance of 2.3 metres is not informative, but because the word 'next' relates to a sufficient number of experiences to identify what it means to be in close proximity to something. That 'something', part of so many patterns our mind has processed over the years, informs us about the importance of being 'next', regardless of what we are next to.

In other words, 'next' has become the symbol for a particular, multifaceted experience and it is exactly because the scope is left open-ended the symbol has power.

Therefore 'express train' relies on its precision to inform us, but 'next' does so due to its inherent ambiguity.

Swap the types around and the sentence becomes downright silly: "Standing 5.6 metres away from something is quite an experience". See what I mean?

An analogy to the above would be two versions of a basic scenario. There is a dark room with an object inside. In version one the object is a small coin and we use an average light bulb for illumination. In version two the object is a big statue and we use a strong but narrow beam of light. In which case would the object be more easily identified?

Surely the relatively dim and diffuse light from the bulb would help us find the coin quite quickly, but a narrow beam of light needs much more work to even find the statue, let alone tell us what it is.

Symbols as open-ended representations have their uses but care needs to be taken what they are paired with. By the same token, precise definitions are important but their relationship with the real must hold. Remove either from the context they need in order to function properly and confusion results or the message gets altered, often insidiously so.

At the time of writing SBS Television is running a commercial heralding its upcoming series on indigenous history in Australia. The voice-over tells of over three hundred nations across the continent, and indigenous culture is referred to as a civilisation lasting thousands of years.

Three hundred 'nations'? A 'civilisation'? There were hundreds of tribes; yet a nation represents a formally configured society, featuring documented evidence of its instrumentalities, purposefully organised layers of activity systems, general infrastructure. A civilisation implies evolutionary achievement, literature, technology, philosophical and scientific endeavours. None of them can be found among indigenous people, wherever in the world they are.

To have the meaning of words transposed from a precise definition to the unconstrained scope of a symbol, merely because the symbol per se sounds attractive, introduces ambiguity where it does not belong while at the same time neutering the power of language to inform and instruct.

It is dumbing down at its most dangerous.

The Wall Street story

The events on Wall Street are not only a symptom of a general malaise (see previous blog) but can be identified as certain specific functionalities going through their paces. In the process other domains become affected.

One benefit of using functionalities rather than content is the former's scalability, not so easily done with the latter. For example, a one kilogram iron bar requires a different neighbourhood than one weighing a tonne. But see them as a lever (a functionality) and that property can be applied regardless.

Since we can scale, let's start small. Consider the price of wheat per kilo and compare it with the price of bread of the same weight. Naturally bread costs more, reflecting the value-adding process it has undergone. If an economy were to consist of only two types of people, wheat growers and bakers, we have a problem with the generation of wealth. It is not enough to sell wheat and bread. If money is required to take care of things other than those two, for every unit of wheat grown and sold, and for every unit of bread baked and sold, there needs to be enough left over from the profits to pay for everything else. But how can this happen unless one party decides to up the price unilaterally and thereby condemn the other to perpetual bare survival. Such a situation cannot last.

So let's widen our model and add other materials and products and their respective generators. For the system to work the unit price of every good (and any associated service for that matter) must be such that, firstly, enough is left over for 'everything else' but secondly, some unit prices must be higher than others in order to introduce the differences necessary for someone's purchasing power to cover the scope of goods that economy is able to offer. (By the way, here are the underlying reasons why demographics featuring a small number of products can never be as wealthy as their more diverse counterparts - unless of course artificial loading is imposed from the outside)

A goldsmith, say, operates with different unit prices altogether as far as their raw materials and the end products are concerned. The proceeds from one gold ring buys many loafs of bread, and the baker needs a relatively broad customer base in order to afford jewellery. Add as much variety of materials and products as you wish, in principle the same relationships hold. There must be a general difference in unit prices across the spectrum to enable the proceeds to widen their usefulness in tandem with the richness of the entire economy.

But unit prices alone are not enough. Not only is a gold ring worth more than a loaf of bread, the output per time units of a goldsmith can be less than that of a baker and profits can still be realised.

What about the bottom rung in our model so far? Wheat growers do not necessarily come last because selling a lot of wheat takes care of the hierarchy in terms of unit prices per se. As long as the relationship in numbers between farmers and food processors is a reasonable one, the equation holds overall.

These two entities, price units and time units, can be combined for any commodity, let's call it the product unit. The discrepancies between product units (price- and time-wise) across an economy allow profits to be made, simply because there is always some price in relation to some other, and there is always some time period in relation to some other, which produce an oversupply of value (represented by money) such that some other product can be purchased.

So far we have assumed a certain intent to keep the system in balance. That view is improbable given human nature and the sheer resources needed to administer any transgressions. Most people will want to increase their profits, either through producing more or through jacking up the price. However, there are ultimate limits represented by the size of the market and its willingness to pay. Generally speaking the system settles into a balance more or less due to those factors. Nevertheless, a greater variety of products and a greater number of operators increase the chances of useful differences and hence profit making. It also means that there always will be a hierarchy of profitabilities regardless what certain idealists may wish for and regardless of the means of exchange, be that money, services, or status.

Suppose now someone wanted to work around these barriers. There are two options. Come up with a new product entirely and - for some time at least - it will have placed itself outside the dampening cycle of interacting pre-existing product units. Invent the light bulb and for the moment you have the market to yourself.

That option, although effective, is time and resource consuming and therefore not readily available (but it does exist).

Another option is to come up again with a new product, but this time one which is cheaper to implement. Remember the relationships between product units, all based on the exchange of their respective values, and made possible through our means of exchange, that is money.

If you view money itself as yet another product, the same interdependencies of price and time units can be applied. All you need to do is insert a process dealing with money alone into the flow and the same principles hold.

This is exactly what happened over the last few decades. Actually, one can argue the appearance of financial instruments started with the invention of paper money in China, or cheques by the Hanse, or, for that matter, the manipulations by the US Federal Reserve Bank early in the 20th century as the move away from the gold standard started to take hold there.

Still, whatever the performances of monetary product units may be, as long as the link between their dynamics and those of the other product units they in the end represent is not too tenuous the system will still work, because their respective time factors (of both, the money-related products and the rest) fit into the overall spectrum of delay and/or availability of products.

However, widen the time spans and eventually the system will slow down or even grind to a halt; put simply, money takes too long to reach the areas where it is required to play its part in the product unit cycles.

Right now the insertion process of an ever growing number of money-related products and their associated processes has widened the gap considerably, so much so that the combined price and time units of those products the money is meant to represent in the end are no longer able to keep pace with the processes belonging to those newcomers. The results can be seen around the world.

In principle, the solution is simple: remove those artificial products and with them their processes. In practice there are dangers. They centre on the existing linkages between those products and the others in the rest of the economy. To find the path of least damage requires a considerable data base containing the instantiated effects of products and their neighbours. Knowing what to remove without affecting their dependencies (such as they are) requires a commensurate familiarity with the economic structure in all its detail. I doubt whether such a flow chart even exists, never mind its use.

On the other hand, the system itself ensures that unviable products are sooner or later left by the wayside in any case. Natural re-adjustments come at a cost however, and the damage can be seen every time an economic system purges itself. Nevertheless, an organised type of healing should be possible once we have made the effort of pairing the functional picture with its content-related counterpart. While not an easy exercise I would suggest its costs are insignificant compared to those of a meltdown.

Yet whatever happens, it isn't the end of the world.

Uncle Sam and his family of man

As keyboards around the world run hot punching out the latest spins on the current financial crisis this is as good an opportunity as any to append the system's view under Otoom; a view that had been established long before the present woes were no more than yet another gleam in the masters' of the universe little eyes.

Let's start with a general statement: a system, any system, does not falter just because one of its subsystems has failed. Complex dynamics cannot be added or subtracted as with a bag of groceries. Taking out one, two, or three items will still leave you with that bag, but render one, two, or three subsystems inoperable and there comes a point when suddenly there is no system - at least under the current auspices. Complex systems are like that.

The world of finance is one vast complex system in itself and connects to other similarly vast regions that define human society. Its faults are many.

For a system to be sustainable in the long term each one of its parts must contribute to its maintenance; exceptions can be entertained provided they are being managed.

One myth that defines our times relates to the idea of equality. Not the equality before the law or the offering of opportunities, but the assumption that everybody is the same when it comes to personal qualities and circumspection. The very mantra "Anybody can be president" so often espoused in the US is nothing more than a conceptual anesthetic to lull voters (the minority that actually bothers to vote) into a convenient dream. Translate such a phantasy into lending patterns and we get 'sub-prime' mortgages, a euphemism standing for dishing out money to illusory characters.

Even greed does not underwrite those practices, for greed looks for returns (even if not much else besides).

Systems are interdependent within their domains but the degree to which any one of its parts relates to any other is a function of the respective channels of communication. The data criss-crossing the landscape, their interpretation and indeed their creation, all become a matter of how well the entities perform. Larger complexes can reach a stage where the conceptual distance induces a blurring of shapes just like a building can disappear behind smog. A resident can still know about the building, but to anyone not familiar with the district it may as well not even exist.

Over the last few decades a whole range of financial instruments have been created for the sole purpose of making money out of their dynamics; they represent subsystems which have been hidden from the general population. Neither their existence nor their nature appeared on the screens of many of our regulatory mechanisms designed to rein in excesses.

Hardly any business would countenance having its stock plundered by others in order to profit from contrived opportunities only known to themselves. Yet shares and their derivatives (already removed from the source that made them possible in the first place), traded within the context of short selling or naked short selling, were dragged down arcane passages subjecting them to questionable rituals. Shares themselves are merely items of symbolic value with a tenuous link to what they are actually meant to represent. Their fluctuations in price do not reflect the hourly quality of some product but the visceral emotions of gamblers. Perception rules; psychosis is king.

Functionalities, an often misunderstood yet powerful analysis tool under Otoom nevertheless, represent our conceptualisations as they become manifest. Acuity of vision or the lack of it, is a functionality owned by receivers of information regardless of where they are found. Degeneration - another type of dynamic - can spread across areas if such progress is made possible through underlying trends. If our masters can perform in an atmosphere of shortsightedness then chances are the ambience is of a general nature that encompasses the rest of society. Thus the housing crisis rests on levels of debt reflecting a desire for instant fulfillment; so does obesity; so does road rage; so does violence in the class room.

Lack of understanding rests on a paucity of thinking. A superficiality that allowed the effects of short selling to be shrugged off as someone else's problem can also be found in the outsourcing of aircraft maintenance; in the exporting of long-developed skills; in placing infants in child care. When something goes wrong eventually the resultant indignation is a measure of the guilt waiting in the wings.

Complex systems do not go quietly. The road to dissolution may appear placid, but any one of its subsystems can spring a surprise event which then overwhelms its neighbours in a possibly cataclysmic fashion. Even if the current fallout from the financial upheaval will have been cleaned away and put down as mere murmurs they are like the creaking of beams in a mine - one too many and the collapse will have reduced the edifice to just another layer of rocks.