Metaphoric entrapment in time: avoiding the trap of Project Logic

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Introduction

We are all exposed to a variety of conceptual frameworks and beliefs, as well as to a wide range of designed physical environments. The arts provide us with cultural analogues. The academic world provides us with conceptual analogues in the form of models and theories. Spiritual leaders provide us with ethical and mystical variants. We are variously entranced by these and may creatively use our capacity to engender our own, possibly to entrance others. International initiatives endeavour to persuade people of the unquestionable merit of particular ethical or explanatory frameworks -- as a basis for particular patterns of action into which most will be hopefully mobilized.

This paper is concerned with the ways in which we are entrapped by the metaphors that underly such patterns. It is concerned with clarifying the nature of the entrapment process and how it helps to understand who we are as the entrapped -- or as the entrappers. The term "entrapment" is used to provoke recognition of the extent to which people are trapped, or endeavour to trap others as part of their working mandate or their interpersonal dynamics. But this exploration is also designed to highlight how some form of "entrapment" seems to be a necessary in order to constrain and discipline our physical, social and conceptual behavior. There is thus an ambiguity to appropriate understanding of entrapment as a characteristic of civilization as currently understood.

This exploration derives its inspiration from four observations:

• Personal violence is for the amateur in dominance; structural violence is the tool of the professional. The amateur who wants to dominate uses guns; the professional uses social structure. The legal criminality of the social system and its institutions, of government, and of individuals at the interpersonal level is tacit violence. Structural violence is a structure of exploitation and social injustice. It seems to survive very well the changes from a slave society, via a feudal and capitalist order, to lodge in a socialist society. (Johan Galtung)
  
  
• A trap is a function of the nature of the trapped (Geoffrey Vickers. Freedom in a Rocking Boat : Changing values in an unstable society, 1972)
  
  
• The world we inhabit is abundant beyond our wildest imagination... Still many are bothered...and they react accordingly -- they try to 'block off' what disturbs them. For them the world is too complicated and they want to simplify it further... The search for reality that accompanied the growth of Western civilization played an important role in the process of simplifying the world... What we find, with very few exceptions, are intellectual leaders repeating slogans which they cannot explain and which they often violate, anxious slaves following in their footsteps and institutions offering or withdrawing money in accordance with the fashions of the day... (Paul Feyerabend. Conquest of Abundance, 1999)
  
  
• In contrast with what is commonly assumed, a description, when carefully inspected, reveals the properties of the observer. We observers, distinguish ourselves precisely by distinguishing what we apparently are not, the world. (Francisco Varela)

Galtung's identification of structural violence may be extended to include the many invidious forms of easily deniable conceptual violence that justify and reinforce the attitudinal traps into which people are forced. Vickers suggests the extent to which entrapment is an unrecognized function of attitude and comprehension -- and possibly self-imposed. Feyerabend clarifies how such conceptual constraints reduce the richness of an abundant reality. Varela points out the self-reflexive consequences of this approach -- and the extent to which such traps are not the world.

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