Global Governance via a Double-breasted Strange Attractor

Exploring use of the breast metaphor here in relation to governance.

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Global Governance via a Double-breasted Strange Attractor
Strategic compass
Governor control
Global strategy and governance modelled by constraining local breast movement?
Double-breasted vs Single-breasted?
Tensional integrity of bubbles and their chirality?
Reconstructive "surgery": financial system vs breast system
Implications for design of a regulated financial system?
Alternation
Globality, cosmology and birth
As "above", so "below"?

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Annex B of Engaging with Globality through Knowing Thyself (2008), Dimension 4 of a four-fold exploration. [Engaging with Globality -- Dimension 1: Cognitive Realignment; Dimension 2: Cognitive Circlets; Dimension 3: Cognitive Crowns; Dimension 4: Knowing Thyself]

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integrity of bubbles -- and their chirality?
for design of a regulated financial system?

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Introduction

The following is one example of an exercise envisaged in Playfully engaging with globality through re-categorization and re-classification (in Dimension 4). The context for this exploration of a metaphor with sexual connotations is the subject of a series of comments provided separately as Annex A (Engaging with Globality through Playful Re-categorizing):

examples | Logical vs Aesthetic correspondences | Meaningful connectivity
Surfaces and orifices | Consumption and consumerism | "Knowing" another | Courtship | Kama Sutra

The cognitive implications of the metaphor are further developed in Annex C (Engaging with Globality through Dynamic Complexity) and in Annex D (Intercourse with Globality through Enacting a Klein bottle).

Although a degree of speculative humour is intended, the challenge of finding new ways of framing goverance in a turbulent society is the preoccupation. That dynamic nature of that challenge was perhaps best recognized by an early policy scientist Geoffrey Vickers (Freedom in a Rocking Boat: changing values in an unstable society, 1972). Of considerable cognitive value, he noted that: "a trap is a function of the nature of the trapped".

As noted in Annex A, this exploration is premised on the assumption that sustainable governance is necessarily sexy -- and if it is not then it is unlikely to be sustainable. By designing sex out of governance, sex has become identified with the problematic shadow of humanity.

Exploring the breast metaphor here in relation to governance is notably justified by the frequent French usage of "sein", in the singular, with respect to governance, for example: Donner une voix à l'Afrique au sein de la gouvernance globale (Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Forum for a New World Governance, March 2007). Given the focus on "designing" the future through governance (cf Peter Ellyard. Designing 2050: pathways to sustainable prosperity on spaceship Earth, 2007), it is also intriguing that "design" in French is "dessein", implying the undertaking of a project (including that of the Creator, as in intelligent design). Such usage might also be understood as "from the breast".

Rather than this static, "single-breasted" approach, the focus here is on the cognitive implications of "seins" in the plural (and their dynamics) with respect to the dynamics of governance. Curiously those in governance, caricatured as "suits", typically wear "double-breasted" suits in contrast with the "single-breasted" form.

Symbolic uniform of 21st century global governance?

-- and of the cover-up regarding the financial bubble of 2008 with its economic consequences for all

Exploring the metaphor in the light of the current financial crisis for governance is justified by the extent to which "playing" is a notion common to the market and to courtship behaviour, as is speculation and risk taking. The argument here is that breasts constitute a dynamic attractor of sufficient complexity to reflect the comprehension challenges within governance in dealing with options and alternatives. They might be seen as the most developed of various attractors capable of refocusing attention, starting with the movements of a child's rattle and in contrast with more mechanical systems such as the centrifugal governor or with the cynical distractants of the Roman Empire "bread and circuses" (panem et circenses).

The implication of dynamic symbols, in contrast with their common static form has been explored elsewhere (Moving Symbols: radical change in religious psycho-social energy policy?, 2008).

Put most simply, however, it could be argued that breasts offer the most familiar, concrete and accessible understanding of "globality" in its geometric sense -- in contrast with the abstract geometric representations or manufactured artefacts. Whether, male or female, this understanding dates from earliest infancy. It is therefore understandable that for human groups, and humanity as a whole, globality is recognized as a source of sustenance. How such globality functions in its virtual form is yet to be fully understood.

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