Feb 1, 2022
On Waves and Dimensions 2: Geopolitical Manifestation of Emotional Trauma at Scale
Who doesn’t love a sequel?
Before we begin:
- I’m a wizard
- I think about reality in weird ways because I’m a wizard
In my last article about this subject On Waves and Dimensions I spent some time pondering the ways waves can move through physical space. I made some comparisons in that article to gravity, and waves from the ocean, and it ended by wondering what a wave in culture would look like.
This article is a haphazardly strewn together follow up with some relevant and related thoughts I’ve had since then.
What does the speed of light actually measure?
The speed of light is the same as the speed of gravity. We know this because we’ve been able to measure both. This means that if the sun were to magically blink out of existence we’d continue to see AND orbit it for 8 minutes. That’s so strange.
It’s interesting that gravity can modify light but this doesn’t seem to be reversed. Or does it? Is the creation of energy the same thing as the creation of light? We can use energy to escape a gravitational pull. This seems to point to a type of symmetry that feels compelling and may be accurate? I sure wish I could download all of physics into my brain or had the time and resources to better study it.
This thought is relevant to the concept of “waves in culture” because we can see that a wave in culture appears to happen in our minds but is transmitted in a way other than physical waves — if such a thing as a wave in culture exists.
Shockwaves of Geopolitical Conflict
I don’t know if I’m supposed to or not but sometimes I visualize some things as other things to try to get a better idea of them. I try not to do this with specific people or groups of people because I think those things merit independent analysis, but that’s hard and I definitely do it sometimes anyway. The recent Hunga Tonga eruption inspired a bunch of thought in me around social conflict.
A volcanic eruption is such a visible and intense example of reality changing fundamentally in ways beyond our control.
We can visualize something like that happening in culture. I can see how January 6th would have looked like that in the US. I can see how a wide variety of conflict over my lifetime and throughout history would have looked like that. I can see how Ukraine is poised to be another similar moment.
As mentioned above the space where this shockwave will transpire is different from the physical dimensions where we live, but we can see it traveling between individuals and groups through culture.
Echoes of Errors
What happens after that big energetic blast? It’s easy to see with physical energy measured after a volcanic eruption in our atmosphere:
We think the ground is solid and we don’t even think about air because that’s one of the ways we stay sane. We’ve evolved to filter out real but unnecessary information about reality. But then the planet explodes a little and the ground shakes and the air knocks us over. We assume stability is present when what we really have is an illusion of stability or a lack of instability.
Once a shockwave starts it travels around in a pretty understandable and measurable trajectory because it’s rather simple physics. Not so with shockwaves from culture into the space of ideas. The space of ideas is not tied to the physical dimensions of reality so we can’t see where it’s going and what it’s doing — but it’s going somewhere and doing something.
A shockwave through culture probably looks like a virus infecting minds from our perspective. I wonder what it looks like from other perspectives?
As an aside: I have a plan to build an app to try and understand this better and wrote about it here. Some people are saying stuff that leads me to believe that this type of transmission looks more like a virus than a shockwave which makes sense from our perspective and merits analysis, if only to discern if it’s true and can provide valuable insight.
A Present Example
The conflict in Ukraine is unresolved trauma from generations of regional history echoing around inside the minds of innumerable individuals and manifesting through creativity and culture which is being used or manipulated by political objectives. This is part of all human conflict.
World War 2 is over but we carry it within us. The US Civil War is over but we carry it within us. The Cold War is over but we carry it within us. We have to because the systems we need to sustain this version of the world were built through those epochal moments.
The social conflict in North America which manifested in the January 6th attack on the US Capitol, various rushed or failed attempt to hold US politicians accountable for systemic abuse or alleged criminal behavour (Benghazi, various Trump impeachments, voting fraud investigations), and most recently the Canadian Trucker protest, is in part unresolved trauma from the systemic abuse and neglect people are experiencing as a result of imperfect systems with evident unresolved flaws. People do not feel that the resolutions provided to them by the systems designed to support them are sufficient so everyone gets stuck in a wide variety of loops.
Important: all of those things are being influenced by individuals or organizations with significant resources in order to achieve their goals. People with more individual beliefs and objectives are also participating, sometimes corporate entities in these spaces take advantage of people.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I went through a bunch of courses to become an adoptive parent. This included a lot of work relating to childhood trauma. One of the lessons I learned that’s often stuck with me is that our mental habits become like ski tracks formed in the woods by cross country skiers. Forming the first tracks is a different level of difficulty than continuing to follow them. We think ourselves down familiar paths in order to understand and react to things because that’s easiest and we naturally want hard things to be easy. Forming new ones is also a different level of difficulty because then you have a specific ski style. When we’re failing to overcome a challenge we get stuck in loops where we keep favouring the easiest track but those are not effective tracks for going new places or doing new things.If we want to make new tracks we try to make them in trails that look familiar to us.
This happens with people so it happens with organizations and institutions of people. Those things aren’t capable of independent thought or action yet. People describe corporations as single amoral entities but they’re not. They are the sum totality of the desires manifested by the systems of power within them, and those desires come from people and are enabled by people.
I’m not qualified to psychoanalyze people or institutions and I’m probably wrong about a bunch of stuff, or at least imprecise in some relevant way. I also believe that something about reality relates to consciousness as a form of energy which is disconnected from our physical reality. This relates to the multidimensionality of reality in ways that we don’t yet understand or know how to measure. Also this appears to be the wrong conclusion to come to for many people.
Update: February 18th.
I haven’t been able to draw a better representation of that image because every single thing represented in this image is well beyond my ability to really understand in the timelines that I need to understand it.
So I’m cheating and I’m just listening to the smartest people I can find. I strongly recommend checking out Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal on YouTube. Curt is delving into a wide variety of technically complex subjects and he does it in a style that I feel can make it easy to follow along. Every subject is seriously handled and he gives his high quality guests time to shine.
