Systems theory, social psychology

          Oh delicious knowledge. This is what I’m talking about when I say systems theory is gonna be everything, they can use the same equation series to model nerve excitations as well as turbulent/stochastic and quantum processes with the Fokker-Planck set: Hierarchical Modularity: The Description of Multi-Level Complex Systems as Nested Coupled Fokker-Planck Equations  I mean… come onnnnnnnn. We’re in the magic realm now with physics and supercomputing, and now even neuropsych is adopting systems models to make sense of things. If they’re as promising as they seem, the universe might very well be computable in layers. Now how’s that for meta?

  

What I find interesting about all the “multi level complex systems” coming out is their structures directly reflect the sentiments of the authors. I don’t know really how to describe that, but shit like this really makes me grind my teeth: Multi-level Modeling of Complex Socio-Technical Systems

  

In contrast to the first paper, which is so pure and optimistic, this second one is a complete arbitrary application of complex systems and is exactly why we should be careful how we use our wizard powers. This second paper is trying to apply the field to analyze defense and healthcare enterprises as well as look toward modeling a “policy flight simulator.” What I notice is what they give precedence to in their modeling, and it’s some bourgeois snidely garbage if you ask me. I shudder to think who’s taken this stuff seriously with the money to spend. I say that because when you simulate and possibly install policy based on arbitrary constructs and proceeding dynamics, especially ones centered on markets and defense policy rather than the general health of the society, you’re displacing the whole reason for having governance and markets and defense in the first place. Instead you’re basing your governance off a fucking conspiracy theory designed to help “secure defense communications” or to describe “large-scale public-private enterprises.” Makes my skin crawl.

 

There’s a godawful lot of assumptions and money needed to even begin thinking complex systems analysis is appropriate here, and that primarily revolves around mythologizing aspects of the social order into a control theory that someone is going to buy into and use to their own ends. That has bad results, man, and this is so on the nose of like what’s exactly wrong with politics over the past few centuries - illusions built on illusions! Plato’s Cave’s got nothing on this! AHHHHHH!!! *head explodes* Seriously, check out the documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Adam Curtis if you wanna melt your mind this week. This paper is only one of decades of similar research into systems modeling for governance and economics, and somehow I’m still shocked this stuff is in style.

 

What is a person who is in control of their illusions, but is not in control of themselves? *shudders* These fetishistic illusions built on illusions that try to escape reality for someone’s own ends ultimately only harm the source - the Earth we stand on and all its living things with it. As we look around day-by-day, we’re seeing the results of that magical thinking as it ravages the environment and our mental and physical health along with it.

 

The rotten social dynamics Patricia Williams points out in her book Alchemy of Race and Rights are present in everything now, we’re all in the shadow of our imperial beast as it grows beyond containment. I’m seeing the effects in the mental health world as I watch various illness rates climb in our country. A lot of people close to me are also in the squalor of their own possessive and habitual fixations, wrought on them by the powers and stressors in their life. It’s only getting better out there in the sense that our available tools for healing these problems are improving dramatically, but there are simply not nearly enough people who are educated in the reality of mental health and what a healthy mind really means to have the benefits reach a large scale.   
 
WHO: Depression Is Now the Leading Cause of Illness and Disability Worldwide 

 
           That’s partly why I’m writing an essay on wisdom as it connects to my favorite currently-practiced systems models of the mind and health, featuring Interpersonal Neurobiology as communicated by Dan Siegel, Primal Therapy as authored by Arthur and France Janov, Gotama Buddha's own Dhammapada, and the sage text The Corpus Hermeticum. I’m trying to slice through this jungle of mirrors and hearsay for everyone and get a realistic and intuitive but complex picture of life as it is and as it ought to be in terms of being wise, so it’s a lot harder to get lost in all of it and a lot easier to look out for others. I think we tend to ignore that framework-making and take it for granted (as if we can’t science out wisdom, mwahaha), or it only gets spoken about in bits and pieces.