Implication of strange loops for governance -- from fiction

Sustaining a Community of Strange Loops (Part #4)

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Written long before the study of strange loops by Hofstadter, a remarkable description of their cognitive implications is implied in a collective situation by Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing (The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, 1982). Its relevance to governance, as the fourth book in the Canopus in Argos series, lies in its description of the fate of an endangered planet, under the care of the benevolent galactic empire Canopus. The book includes an Afterword, commenting on the series as a whole, in which she concludes with the statement:

It seems to me that we do not know nearly enough about ourselves; that we do not often enough wonder if our lives, or some events and times in our lives, may not be analogues or metaphors or echoes of evolvements and happenings going on in other people? -- or animals? -- even forests or oceans or rocks? -- in this world of ours or, even, in worlds and dimensions elsewhere.

In the challenging tale itself Lessing offers a description of the progressive psychosocial transformation and mutual cognitive entanglement -- surprisingly consonant with the arguments of Hofstadter -- associated with the traumatic pressures to which the population was subjected by the planetary crisis:

...we saw how those old bodies of ours inside their loads of hide were losing their shapes, how the atoms and molecules were losing their shapes, how the atoms and the molecules were losing their associations with each other, and were melding with the substance of the mountain. Yes, what we were seeing now with our new eyes was that all the planet had become a fine frail web or lattice, with the spaces held held there between the patterns of the atoms. But what new eyes were these that could see our old home thus, as interlocking structures of atoms, and where were we, the Representatives -- what were we, and how did we seem to those who could watch us, with their keener finer sight? For, certainly as we changed eyes and ways of seeing so that every moment it seemed that we inhabited a different world, or zone, or reality, it must be that others could watch us, see us -- but see what?... if we had lost what we had been, then we were still something, and moved on together, a group of individuals, yet a unity, and had to be, must be, patterns of matter, matter of a kind, since everything is.... These were the web and the woof and the warp of our new being.... and our minds were telling us that we were still a tenuous though strict dance, just as our old minds had told us what we were, though we had not had eyes to see what we were.

The cognitive entanglement has been noted by various authors (David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world, 1997; Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: a necessary unity, 1979; Henryk Skolimowski, The Participatory Mind: a new theory of knowledge and of the universe, 1995; Warwick Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: developing new foundations for environmentalism, 1995; Theodore Roszak, et al., Ecopsychology: restoring the Earth, healing the mind, 1995). This entanglement is appropriately explored in the literature on cognitive embodiment as separately discussed (Existential Embodiment of Externalities: radical cognitive engagement with environmental categories and disciplines, 2009; En-minding the Extended Body: Enactive engagement in conceptual shapeshifting and deep ecology, 2003). This is a challenge to conventional governance of western inspiration (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy In The Flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to western thought, 1999).

In another volume in the series, Lessing has also addressed the challenge of comprehension in a devastating commentary on communication of insight by a galactic agent with a representative of those facing planetary disaster:

To say that he understood what went on was true. To say that he did not understand -- was true. I would sit and explain, over and over again. He listened, his eyes fixed on my face, his lips moving as he repeated to himself what I was saying. He would nod: yes, he had grasped it. But a few minutes later, when I might be saying something of the same kind, he was uncomfortable, threatened. Why was I saying that? and that? his troubled eyes asked of my face: What did I mean? His questions at such moments were as if I had never taught him anything at all. He was like one drugged or in shock. Yet it seemed that he did absorb information for sometimes he would talk as if from a basis of shared knowledge: it was as if a part of him knew and remembered all I told him, but other parts had not heard a word. I have never before or since had so strongly that experience of being with a person and knowing that all the time there was certainly a part of that person in contact with you, something real and alive and listening -- and yet most of the time what one said did not reach that silent and invisible being, and what he said was not often said by the real part of him. It was as if someone stood there bound and gagged while an inferior impersonator spoke for him. (Re: Colonised Planet 5 - Shikasta, 1979, pp. 56-57).

This was originally cited as offering a striking parallel to the many attempts by the UN Secretary General to communicate to world society the urgency of the present human situation (Societal Learning and the Erosion of Collective Memory, 1980). Reference was also made there to learnings relevant to any collectivity to be obtained from current insights into the pathology of individual memory (Collective Memory Personified: an Analogy, 1980; Pointers to the Pathology of Collective Memory, 1980).

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