Sustainability enabled by a pattern of feedback cycles

Oppositional Logic as Comprehensible Key to Sustainable Democracy (Part #13)

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The quest for sustainability in relation to the dynamics between otherness and anti-otherness suggests that this is intimately related to the configuration of cycles as they may be associated with the geometry of polyhedral forms or their musical analogues. How many feedback cycles are required for sustainability -- and of what variety? What ensures that psychosocial sustainability is not inherently boring and therefore unstable?

Especially intriguing is the sense in which sustainability may be understood as an infinite game, as remarkably explored by James P. Carse (Finite and Infinite Games: a vision of life as play and possibility, 1986) and otherwise articulated by Niki Harré (The Infinite Game: how to live well together, 2018). Such insights are readily seen as inspired by the Glass Bead Game (1943) envisioned by Hermann Hesse. Such inspiration is challenged by more questionable uses of the insight (Playing the Great Game with Intelligence, 2013).

Relating sustainability to an infinite game frames the provocative question as to when familiarity with a game becomes boring -- as particularly defined. The game is then transformed from engaging into a problematic otherness -- necessitating anti-otherness strategies to inhibit emergence of unforeseen destabilizing variety. The vast array of polyhedra, together with their higher dimensional variants, then offers a metaphor whereby the "tokens" and "rules" of a game may be reframed as subject to transformation -- a shift from the static conventions of a rule-bound game.

Sustainable democracy might then be better understood as a truly infinite game capable of calling itself into question in ways as yet to be understood. These are perhaps suggested by the arguments of Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable, 2007; Antifragile: things that gain from disorder, 2012).

There is the intriguing sense that a game becomes boring and vulnerable to surprise following experience of cycles as repetitive. This could be understood as when it is remembered only too well, as suggested by the adage of George Santayana: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it (1905).

In a global society variously dependent on cycles for sustainability. at what point does their repetition evoke "revolution" -- namely the cycle metaphor otherwise understood?

Speculative succinct summary of engaging opposition -- sustainably or otherwise (using widely recognized blue/red pill distinctions of choice from The Matrix)
Caduceus (and Rod of Asclepius) (symbol of medicine and health care)	Caduceus-Hygieia animation	Hygieia Bowl of Hygieia (symbol of pharmacy and hygiene)
"Red-pill" awareness: mirror self-recognition self-reflexive capacity negative capability "seen the enemy; them is us" flying "otherwise" with coordination of counteracting wings requisite alternation for movement, depth perception and regeneration		"Red-pill" awareness: critical recognition of "blue pill" complacent complicity in game-playing questioning ability of linear thinking to enable navigation of the curvature of the adaptive cycle pattern recognition through use of bowl as scrying medium engaging otherwise ("being the pill")
"Blue-pill" awareness: comfortably adapted to conventions of demonizing otherness in game-playing "if you're not with us, you're against us" "flying" as driving metaphor continuing struggle to fly with one wing competing against the other		"Blue-pill" awareness: uncritical dependence on medication to sustain accommodation to dis-comfort and dis-ease assumption that adaptability needs only linear thinking -- despite experienced discomfort use of substance dependence to cultivate the illusion that all is well -- bowl as primary source of lethe
The animation includes an appropriately subliminal image of a "red pill" view down into the "scrying bowl" -- of a DNA cross-section, implied by the Caduceus, variously compared to a symbol of the Flower of Life, an exemplification of oppositional geometry
Relevant arguments: Psychosocial Transformation by "Pill Pushing"? Model-making, strategic advocacy and the myth of the "red pill" (2016) Counteracting Extremes Enabling Normal Flying: Insights for global governance from birds on the wing and the dodo (2015) Pricking the Bubble of Global Complacent Complicity: Hyperdimensional insights from the physics of bubble blowing, bursting and collapse? (2017) Visualization in 3D of Dynamics of Toroidal Helical Coils -- in quest of optimum designs for a Concordian Mandala (2016) Climbing Elven Stairways: DNA as a macroscopic metaphor of polarized psychodynamics (2007) Transforming and Interweaving the Ways of Being Stoned: imagination, promise, rocks, memorials, petrification (2006)

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