Fractal Cult

[Cramulus]

Update: Pamphlet in Progress: http://www.scribd.com/doc/42678527





I don't know what this topic means yet, but I keep thinking about these words.


I seek to create a new sect of discordia separate from POEE or the Erisian Liberation Front or the Legion of Dynamic Discord or any of that.


the kernel is something like this:

The universe is infinitely complex, but recursive.

ie: You can see recurring patterns and structural similarities at many different levels of magnification.


This is why your biological systems are a pretty good description of our society. (Your circulatory system, for example, has a lot in common with both the transportation system and the economy.)


You, Einstein, and Jeffery Dahmer have basically the same problems.


This is why it makes sense to talk about organizations with the same language we use to describe individuals.


The trials you face in day to day life are a synechdoche of the greater spiritual trials you will face during your life.


This is why you can see the truth in clouds.

[Cramulus]

how does this belief impact our behavior?




-it suggests that changes you make at a very basic level may impact the greater picture you can only see if you zoom out --- SO LONG AS THOSE CHANGES are part of the pattern.

-it means accepting that the devil's in the details

[Cramulus]

ritual is the wrong word for the right idea

I seek to develop techniques to be used in day to day life which help develop an awareness of the big picture contained within the little picture -- and vice versa.

Something which connects the individual to the big picture though a ... mythological narrative.


The Jungian Archetypes and Joseph Campbell's Monomyth are probably a good place to start.




how do these ideas strike you cats?

[Remington]

Sounds awesome! Although I don't get all the philosophical references...
<--- Noob


I like the comparison between organic and economic systems particularly.

[Cramulus]

Sounds awesome! Although I don't get all the philosophical references...
<--- Noob

Carl Jung was a contemporary of Freud. He liked Freud's model of the mind to a point, and then the two went in very different directions.

Jung wrote prolifically about what he called Archetypes. These are things (symbols & myths) which occur in almost every human culture. Jung believed they were somewhat core to the human experience, they emerge from what he called the "collective unconscious". For example, nearly every culture has some variation on Beauty and the Beast. Nearly every culture has a trickster figure, and that trickster is pretty similar in most cultures. Coyote and Anansi are practically the same guy, the trickster within all of us.


Joseph Campbell focused on the jungian idea of the Hero. His book The Hero With a Thousand Faces talks about the similarities between all heroic narratives. He thought that there was essentially one story, the story of a child facing a challenge, and in doing so, becoming an adult. (Campbell loved Star Wars... he thought those films captured this monomyth particularly poignantly)


Joseph Cambpell's book The Power of Myth sits ever vigilant by my bedside table. Along with Siddhartha and the I Ching, it's the book I most frequently crack open when I need advice. I find that reading about Odysseus' trials give me a resolve I need to face my own. We tell this myth over and over again because it is a story about ourselves.

It often seems that one's day to day life is not heroic, it's mundane. Jason slayed a Hydra, whereas I have to pay a cell phone bill and fix my relationship with my girlfriend.

But when I'm working my ass off, lonely and longing for home, I visualize Odysseus at the prow of the boat sailing towards Penelope, and that steels me up for what's next.

[Triple Zero]

-it means accepting that the devil's in the details

How about "The Goddess's in the details" ?

Also I immediately got the thought that if I'm in the Fractal Cult, then I am the Fractal Cult of which my toes and fingers are members

And if we can go down, we can go up, and I'm wondering if, with the global communications and all, can we make something REALLY BIG? I mean, physically big? Something you can see from outer space?

[Cramulus]

that's a cute image!

You are the cult leader, your fingers and toes are your followers. They must do rituals every day to support the Leader. 

And if we can go down, we can go up, and I'm wondering if, with the global communications and all, can we make something REALLY BIG? I mean, physically big? Something you can see from outer space?

We already have - you can see lights, cities, and the large organs of our collective nervous system from space. (I mean it starts to blur into the landscape as you go up, but it's there)

I guess the fractal logic there is that you are not looking at New York City, you are looking at 10 million individuals living their lives at once. But that's too complex for us to make sense of, we have to use a short hand. But if we can communicate with a few of the people in that big throbbing mass of light and concrete, we can get a pretty good grasp of the whole thing.



The fractal lesson which connects the big and the small is best illustrated by the movers and shakers in this world who HAVE united the small problems and the big problems.

Visualize Martin Luther King... here is a young black man with a family he loves dearly, and he wants to do something about the unfair world that other people built for him. And on a personal level, we're talking about getting seated at a diner, we're talking about two different water fountains, we're talking about a conversation that happens at a dinner table.

And at a macro level we are talking about getting organized and marching and giving speeches everybody will remember for all time.

Somehow those conversations he had with his daughter about why she wasn't allowed to go to Funtown became something larger which united everybody - and we get Martin Luther King Jr day off from school now. Almost every American city has an MLK boulevard.


King was able to springboard his ideas to a higher level of exposure, he was able to transmute words into action which then turned into louder words and bigger action. How did he do this?


He described a current that a lot of people could resonate with. This wasn't an isolated, individual problem he faced, it was a universal problem which manifests at the individual level. We cannot fight the big octopus called Racism, we have to deal with its tentacles, the day to day actions which are the limbs of the core idea. They exist on our level of magnification.

Once the signal you are sending out is being amplified by all the different parts of the network, the change takes on a life of its own, it becomes larger than the individual, but it still carries shades of the original signal.


And this is how I am solving the problems in my relationship.

you read the news and you see that Israel and Palestine are having peace talks again. And nobody thinks they're going to result in peace but they keep trying anyway. Because if they don't, shit, that's like committing to violence and misery?

And I don't have a lot of hope that these talks are going to fix my relationship, they usually only seem to inflame things. But like conflict in the mideast, if we both approach them with the desire to have peace instead of war, there is a chance we can disarm and redeem ourselves. I got laid yesterday and it gave me hope for the world.

[bugmenоt]

And because he's dead now, you can invent mysterious stories about Mandelbrot. His theories could very well be directly linked to Hermes Trismegistos' teachings.

Let's look at those archetypes. If I understood, they are like patterns which appear in the small picture as well as in the big picture.
So I can define an archetype like "oracle".
I can describe it as "There is a desire for having an instance which gives answer to question."
I can find it in the past: like the Oracle of Delphi.
I can find it in the present: like Google.
I can find it inside myself: like human curiosity
I can find it inside the society: like religions, science, etc.

Does this system allow linking anything to anything?

[Cramulus]

to paraphrase a favorite --

Everything is connected - but not equally connected. Some things are more directly connected than others.


signal detection is an important problem for anybody that works with Chaos


for example we can view contemporary America through the lens of the fall of rome -- but the significance of this metaphor has a lot to do with how we paint the picture, how we slice up the meaning, how we tell the story. In short it is a signal detection problem.

I think that part of the Fractal Cult initiation will involve learning to recognize the recurring shapes at various levels of magnification.

i'd also like to note that while structural similarities abound, everything is unique. When you're exploring a Mandelbrot fractal, you keep seeing that big butt fractal bug all over the place.. but none of them are identical. Each one of them has its own unique shape and character. And that uniqueness is reflected in all of its parts.

[Cramulus]

  btw if anybody gets anything out of my rambling, feedback loop it back at me

this is largely an idea dump. if any of this strikes you as poignant or useful, or you have your own take on those words "Fractal Cult", dump it out!

[Remington]

So, for this fractal thing.
Does this theory support the idea of fractal idiocy?

Take Sarah Palin, for example. Using fractal theory (and observation), can we not deduce that the idea, beliefs, and patterns that make up Sarah are equally as idiotic as the whole?  That Palin is not just stupid, she's fractally stupid?

[Disco Pickle]

I don't know what this topic means yet, but I keep thinking about these words.


I seek to create a new sect of discordia separate from POEE or the Erisian Liberation Front or the Legion of Dynamic Discord or any of that.


the kernel is something like this:

The universe is infinitely complex, but recursive.

ie: You can see recurring patterns and structural similarities at many different levels of magnification.


This is why your biological systems are a pretty good description of our society. (Your circulatory system, for example, has a lot in common with both the transportation system and the economy.)


You, Einstein, and Jeffery Dahmer have basically the same problems.


This is why it makes sense to talk about organizations with the same language we use to describe individuals.


The trials you face in day to day life are a synechdoche of the greater spiritual trials you will face during your life.


This is why you can see the truth in clouds.

a note about this, piping systems for both water and HVAC mimic the capillary system of blood movement in the body.

also, explaining the movement of electrons in any electrical circuit in laymans terms is easiest when drawing parallels to water piping systems, and thus, biological circulitory systems.

I like the way you think Cram.  I've linked this to a few friends who haven't met Eris yet.  I'm sure this will draw them here, and that will be no small addition to the board should they stay.  They're great thinkers, and one's a rabid Jungian.

I'll have more comments later, currently buried in CAD work.  Nice work though.

[Cramulus]

So, for this fractal thing.
Does this theory support the idea of fractal idiocy?

Take Sarah Palin, for example. Using fractal theory (and observation), can we not deduce that the idea, beliefs, and patterns that make up Sarah are equally as idiotic as the whole?  That Palin is not just stupid, she's fractally stupid?

a few observations about this Sarah Palin thing, using my personal subjective lens and fractal logic...

-like any leader, she bears a structural similarity to her followers.
-she is doing well because she is able to grab the small individual problems people have and handle them in the macrocosmic context of big issue politics. In this, she plays the role of a shaman, connecting the individual's actions to a mythological narrative -- and in the process, creating a world. I think that the world's most influential people are all people who do this- they give the individual a broader context / narrative to explain their lives.

You know how in a fractal you can keep seeing the same shapes over and over again even if you don't zoom in? in comes Christine O'Donnell. She and Palin may as well be cousins. You have a {relatively} young {relatively} attractive conservative female that speaks on a moral frequency and resonates with disenfranchised right wingers leaning towards libertarianism.

This is partially because like-attracts-like. Sarah's involvement in the movement created a receptivity towards similar figures. It's sort of like dating within your "type". My best buddy always dates crazy self-destructive chicks with wild long hair. The tea party always selects outraged mothers who can do the folksy shtick. I bet we'll see another similar character emerge in the next few years, perhaps completing the mystic female trinity of maiden mother and crone.  


Let's zoom out a bit...

we're not talking about Sarah Palin or Christina O'Donnel, we're really talking about tea party movement she's riding. Palin is the symbol of that movement, the real mascot. We can see many similarities between Sarah and the Tea Party. And as a result, we can see similarities between Sarah's household and the Tea Party's greater conflict.


hmmmmmm

I'm going to cut it off there... I was about talk about the parallels between the tea party and bristol palin's unwanted pregnancy, but I fear I'm making signal detection errors. It's hard to examine stuff like this objectively without infusing it with my political opinions. I might just be using the fractal metaphor as a framework to trash talk the right wing, which doesn't extend our knowledge of either fractals or politics.

so let's reel it back to the personal level again...

The tension between the tea party and the right wing,
& the tension between the tea party and the left wing
                     is a tension which exists within all of us.

There is an internal battle between autonomy and authority. (when we zoom out this looks like libertarianism vs statism)
There is an internal battle between traditionalism and new ideas (when we zoom out this looks like conservatism vs liberalism)
Within us, there is a battle for control of what is considered "traditional" and "normal" (when we zoom out this looks like GOP vs the Tea Party)

If you want to defeat Sarah Palin on the macro level, you must first defeat her internally.

[Cramulus]

to really drive home what I'm talking about--- I just went upstairs to the company Halloween party

and there's a chick dressed as a witch - with tea bags hanging from her hat and a picture of Christina-O'Donnell on her chest

and she dressed up her baby as Sarah Palin


see, the similarities are visible regardless of the levels of magnification  

[Placid Dingo]

One thing that strikes me in 'movements' or 'groups' is that most appear to have a central idea articulated in some form so that everyone is on the same page, or come together organically as a group interested in ideas. If Ayn Rand just rambled on about 'hey so I'm starting this thing called Objectivism where we look at these ideas of....' it wouldn't have made much impact. The books are a lightening rod for the basic concept.

Same as, for all the lashings it gets, if you want to try to explain Discordia without the PD (or these days, The BIP, AD, etc) you're going to make your head hurt. Same for the value of the 'manifesto' of art movements.

So probably it's worth identifying maybe the five or six most important concepts and flashing them out as a larger work.