Highways exist to move traffic,
As Internets exist to move bits,
And Economies to move goods.
All three are paths of movement,
of exchange, of communication.
And with all three, freedom flourishes
only when it is strictly limited by universal,
clear, unambiguous laws.
Without clear limits, the worst and most brutish
of our natural tendencies shall come to rule
the many roads that run between us.
[please bear with me here. this is one of my
metaphysical sketches. i’m primarily concerned
with logic & necessity here. i’ll work this out
later in a visual essay, with examples, photos, etc.
but first, i tell myself: let’s get the logic right!]
We shape the world and the world shapes us.
A weed is a species of movement that roots
in imbalance and feeds on degenerative chaos.
Weeds introduce knots of unresolved contradiction
into the weave of context, both in time and space.
They propagate by a form of irre-resonance, a
kind of ‘false resonance,’ like a hopelessly
mistuned noise—not dissonance, but noise—into
an otherwise self-sustaining musical sound. This
disturbance may begin small, but then may
reverberate out into the wider context, or
interconnected web, or environment, very
quickly. The speed or tempo at which this
takes place may at first be insidiously slow
and go largely unnoticed. (Slow change is from
the human perspective notoriously hard to
detect.) But it may also quickly go into the
runaway of exponential explosion.
These are all properties of interconnected webs.
What is missing is a much more generalized
way of looking that sees weeds as not things,
or individual species, but rather as patterns
of movement, movements which have two
very special properties:
(1) they are contradictory
in an unnatural way;
(2) and because contradictions are opposing
movements which are essentially ‘at war with
one another,’ they are inherently unsustainable.
In this view, contradiction, if unresolved,
necessarily leads to collapse. In this view, it
follows that Nature is and must be
contradiction-free for the simple reason that
contradictions waste energy and are therefore
necessarily unsustainable.
Another key fact which follows from this idea
is that human beings are unique in this regard.
For one simple reason: we are the only species
that will holds onto contradiction to the point
of self-destruction. This is the very dark and
not very well understood characteristic of what
I’ve called the brutish brain. Our thought, when
unenlightened or unaware of itself, continuously
makes the mistake of identifying in an extremely
rigid way outward security with ideas, objects,
beliefs and an unlimited assortment of other
things which, when seen from a broader
perspective, are clearly self-defeating. What
all these ideas, objects and beliefs share is
that they are contradictory. Again, this means
they are therefore unsustainable. And it means
that the unenlightened brutish brain is getting
stuck over and over again in a pattern of
movement, which, again from the wider
perspective, creates not more security but less.