Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
Looters want stability. Builders want opportunity.
Theobald and Bateson used to point out that the viability of a system is proportional to the steady state of its internal differentials. Both employed Bateson’s famous – at the time, at least, and still with me – definition of information: a difference that makes a difference. If a system has no internal differences – say, of opinion, insight, financial holdings, aims, mental and physical abilities, tastes, preferences, etc. – it cannot maintain steady state and must collapse. If a system has too much of internal differences – say by unrelenting, un-self-critical assertions of these differences and these – it cannot maintain steady state and must collapse.
A system with no or chaotic differences does not produce information, which means it does not feedback and therefore cannot adjust or adapt. It is blind both internally and externally. Thus, such a system collapses.
Separation of governmental powers and checks and balances therein and thereon are an effort to keep internal differences occurring so that a political system can maintain steady state viability.
Our precious progressives – unitarians and universalists all – want to eliminate differences. OK, perhaps one should step aside and let them to it. Let them gain speed, mass and energy and think themselves in glory land so that when they hit reality – which they cannot see – they mush up totally, rather than partially, by flying out over the chasm or roaring straight into the flood. Maybe they should be encouraged rather than opposed.
Thought two: “racism” is used now the way “witchcraft” was then. Eliminate differences. Maybe one should stand aside and let them.
Update 1: In May 1970 I was in Phoenix, soon to move to Wickenburg, researching a book for Robert Theobald: Habit and Habitat. Before the book completed and was published (1972), Theobald ripped up my research (January 1971), literally, telling me no one would believe it.
My source was The New York Times.
I parted brass rags with Bob, informed the editor, asking him to remove my name from the project and book, and renounced claim to royalties. My part of the advance was not recalled because I completed my work. Bob published the volume under his name with glancing inclusion of my research.
I was as interested in anti-war protests then as I am now: zero. Never struck me as more than small-potatoes intrinsically and extrinsically mostly glandular turbulence. And, for a steadily increasing number of drug-addled visionaries, anti-war protests embodied lefties’ well-led (by KGB for one reason, CIA for another) brazen and ruthless march against Christian culture. That march, then and still — not anti-war protests — strikes me as big-potatoes.
And incidentally, industrial and agricultural pollution in 1970 also was big-potatoes. It was so big it presented lefties with a target opportunity they could not possibly fail to miss or exploit. I had documented a book’s-worth of it.
Update 2: Myron Ebell and Steven J. Milloy: Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
