……when the utter stupidity of this young human race leaves me wishing for rude awakenings.  The awakenings must be rude, because the character of the stupidity has a willfulness about it, a semi-conscious decision to ignore the most obvious contradictions in our theories:  willful ignorance is stupidity.

Alas, of course any proclamations I might make could easily be a result of my own willful ignorance, but I continue to make them anyway because that’s part of what it means to be human.

Take for instance the ridiculous debate between myself and blogreader Dan (of tdaxp) concerning the existence or non-existence of real “social networks.”  I remain utterly unmoved by his ridiculous posturing, while maintaining my own perhaps unusual perspective on the subject, but I have realized somewhat belatedly that his posturing confounded me and produced from me a scattered defense of my outlook in that blog post.  I have only to step one degree to the left or to the right to become aware that the scattered defense probably became posturing on my part; but, then again, any contemplation of posturing would reveal that word to be intimately related to the notion of placement, and a contemplation of placement — alas — only reaffirms one aspect of my outlook concerning “social networks” since it introduces the concept of perspective into the consideration.

Now, any fool can see that patterns emerge in collective behaviors, or at least appear to.  My central position is that I do not believe that the device of seeing these patterns as some static network will prove useful whatsoever until we have a much firmer understanding of how humans operate, alone and collectively.  That’s what “network theory” is, in essence: the effort to see stable alignments, pathways, and so forth.  It is hoped, one presumes, that the establishment of such a vision will inevitably lead us to an ability to predict future behaviors and any future emergence of patterns.  This is silly, because the very search for a means to predict future emergence admits the falsity of present “networks” — the theorist will declare on the one hand that a static system of relationships exists and on the other hand will declare that some changed alignment is certainly going to emerge from this present static arrangement, as justification for that search for networks.

Thus, such prognosticators must invariably introduce some mechanism for luck, chance, Fortune, etc., into their theory, while remaining unable or unwilling to take a harder look at that mechanism.  At best, they will throw up their hands and admit they do not know what this mechanism is but maintain, throughout, that nonetheless some sort of present pattern exists that will continue to operate in the future, albeit changed or evolved by that mechanism. [See: ‘Unrolling the Future’.] I.e., they want the so-called “network” to be both, static and dynamic. It will evolve in peculiar ways but remain the same: perhaps expand, perhaps deform, perhaps be mixed with other things, but throughout this process something in the present relationships supposed to exist in the network will continue to exist, else these prognosticators would have to admit that their current hobby of seeing patterns is……well, fruitless.

I think that whatever true social networks exist at any given moment must be very small in their scope and very temporary. This consideration does nothing for the network theorists who continue to offer their static-but-dynamic paradigms in the same spirit as entomologists who diagram the forms of their bottled or dissected insects: as if to declare once and for all how things should be, by all appearances, for the subjects under scrutiny, past, present, and future.

It’s a Joke. Really.

The poet and essayist W.H.Auden, in his essay ‘The Joker in the Pack’ (in his book of essays, The Dyer’s Hand)  presents a compelling vision of jokesterism by carefully dissecting the character of Iago from Shakespeare’s Othello:

Iago’s treatment of Othello conforms to Bacon’s definition of scientific enquiry as putting Nature to the Question.  If a member of the audience were to interrupt the play and ask him:  “What are you doing?” could not Iago answer with a boyish giggle, “Nothing.  I’m only trying to find out what Othello is really like”?  And we must admit that his experiment is highly successful.  By the end of the play he does know the scientific truth about the object to which he has reduced Othello.  That is what makes his parting shot, “What you know, you know,” so terrifying for, by then, Othello has become a thing, incapable of knowing anything.

And why shouldn’t Iago do this?  After all, he has certainly acquired knowledge.  What makes it impossible for us to condemn him self-righteously is that, in our culture, we have all accepted the notion that the right to know is absolute and unlimited.  The gossip column is one side of the medal; the cobalt bomb the other.  We are quite prepared to admit that, while food and sex are good in themselves, an uncontrolled pursuit of either is not, but it is difficult for us to believe that intellectual curiosity is a desire like any other, and to realize that correct knowledge and truth are not identical.  To apply a categorical imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, “What can I know?” we ask, “What, at this moment, am I meant to know?” — to entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge we can live up to — that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral.  But, in this case, who are we to say to Iago — “No, you mustn’t.”

That is the conclusion of the essay.  Earlier, Auden makes pains to explain the title of his essay by explaining what, exactly, motivates a practical joker.  One such consideration may bear on future considerations of Fifth-Generation Warfare:

The satisfaction of the practical joker is the look of astonishment on the faces of others when they learn that all the time they were convinced that they were thinking and acting on their own initiative, they were actually the puppets of another’s will.  Thus, though his jokes may be harmless in themselves and extremely funny, there is something slightly sinister about every practical joker, for they betray him as someone who likes to play God behind the scenes.  Unlike the ordinary ambitious man who strives for a dominant position in public and enjoys giving orders and seeing others obey them, the practical joker desires to make others obey him without being aware of his existence until the moment of his theophany when he says:  “Behold the God whose puppets you have been and behold, he does not look like a god but is a human being just like yourselves.”  The success of a practical joker depends upon his accurate estimate of the weaknesses of others, their ignorances, their social reflexes, their unquestioned presuppositions, their obsessive desires, and even the most harmless practical joke is an expression of the joker’s contempt for those he deceives.

That Auden wrote this long before the current exploration of fifth-generation warfare tactics and strategies only shows that perhaps something quite human has existed and may continue to exist into the future although other things change.  It is a quality, but is it a quality of human networks or only of individual humans?

I ask that last, because it gets to the point of departure between my theories of society and Dan’s theories of social networks.  One can suppose that each individual human has a very specific character formed of many parts (or, of ‘observations’) and that human societies are merely collections of individual humans acting toward and reacting to other individual humans; from this, certain patterns appear to emerge when the humans are considered in toto.  Or else, one can suppose that very specific types of relation exist and will continue to exist regardless of the humans who form those networks; i.e., different characters will naturally be inspired — consciously, subconsciously, or unconsciously — to find a place within those relationships, perhaps joining different networks according to character, and the networks themselves will be largely maintained by the infusion of new blood, so to speak.

The difference between these models is very important.

I hold to the first, because it seems to me the most realistic and, moreover, does not require some magical mechanism to explain emerging dynamics in social relationships.  It is the explanation of the mechanism.  While true that individual humans may collectively form established relationships, the introduction of any new human to that system will alter those relationships, subtly or in some pronounced way, simply because no two identical identities (or characters) exist.  Because of the increase in so-called ‘connectivity’ — or, because of the ‘shrinking world’ dynamic — such alterations are not only much more likely to occur now than ever before but also occur more frequently.  Necessarily, this suggests what I have already stated:  to have any meaning whatsoever, ‘social networks’ are likely to be small in scope and also temporary.  To say that a network has formed is to speak of a static relationship, but the social world is quite dynamic, too dynamic to allow for a meaningful consideration of, and prognostication from, some grand network supposedly tying all or most people together.  Because the nature of the theoretical network is constantly changing, thinking of it as a ‘network’ is not only misguided but rather fruitless; the pathing constantly alters.

The second model is important to the consideration of the rulership of rule sets.  In one recent exploration of that subject, I only went so far as to explain the formation of rule sets on an individual basis — for a reason.  Those familiar with my writing will be familiar with my squeamishness concerning the subject of rule sets, a squeamishness which surely comes at least in part from my general anti-authoritarian point of view.  (I will gladly accept the authority of many non-human forces, but stand balked in accepting the authority of other humans.)   It is odd, then, that much of my association over the last year or so, limited as it has been, has been with those who support the notion of grand designs formed in large part by the implementation of grand rule sets:  Dan of tdaxp, Mark Safranski of ZenPundit, Thomas Barnett (the Blogospheric grandfather of the notion), and others. By supposing that particular general but pervasive rule sets can lead to a rather static world dynamic — albeit a static dynamism, one supposes — these theorists in good faith hope to establish some order in the chaos of dynamism.  In such network theory — or, connectivity theory — the idea that some relationships can be made static and enduring is a belief that enduring general relationships can be formed regardless of the humans who compose the system.  As individual humans die, new humans will be born and find their place within that static system, maintaining what may be called a healthy network.

Another part of my squeamishness with the second model comes from the nagging feeling that such network theorizing is extraordinarily abstract, containing no humans whatsoever.  Or else, when actual humans are also considered, the debate shifts to what kind of enforcement of good rule sets should also be devised to maintain the system.  This introduction of the idea of enforcement is actually subtle acknowledgment of the first model, since a constantly shifting set of relationships formed by real individual humans with unique characters is acknowledged as being too chaotic.  Then, there would, properly speaking, be no network but only an extraordinary array of small and temporary networks.  The enforcement, then, is a way to force alignment of characters, which might entail many of the more horrifying attempts at creating uniformity we have witnessed in history, in the effort to establish a sustained network encompassing all.

So it seems that the second model has been prevalent in human history as a model by which societies have been consciously shaped.  But despite all the conscious efforts, societies have never failed to alter in unexpected ways.

We might explain this conundrum (our ever-present search for a healthy resiliency that does not stagnate — thus, because we continue to search, our inability to define such a resiliency, or ‘find’ it) by supposing the existence of some over-arching dynamic or some non-human network within which every human must find his place and which cannot be corrupted or changed by whatever individual humans might do.  Various theisms have attempted to describe that non-human network.  In some ways, this is the rhetorical flourish Dan took in our debate, when he stuck to the notion that all particulars of the physical realm are connected by cause and effect (or, by the ‘World’) and humans must therefore be forever connected.  Such broad strokes for defining connectivity and networking may be consoling, but I think they are hardly useful.

Dreaming the Verge of Convergence

Another approach, one sticking to the first model, may prove more productive.  The very human tendency to connect the dots — assuming an actual whole comprised of individual and quite-separate parts — which gives birth to the fantasy of authentic and specific connectivities may actually bind humans together into relationships when otherwise they’d spin off forever apart.  Dreaming of connection might lead to sustained interactions.

Auden’s consideration of the practical joker is quite prescient.  Yes, the practical joker has contempt for his victims, or for his puppets, but behind this contempt is another motivation:

But, in most cases, behind the joker’s contempt for others lies something else, a feeling of self-insufficiency, of a self lacking in authentic feelings and desires of its own.  The normal human being may have a fantastic notion of himself, but he believes in it; he thinks he knows who he is and what he wants so that he demands recognition by others of the value he puts upon himself and must inform others of what he desires if they are to satisfy them.

But the self of the practical joker is unrelated to his joke.  He manipulates others but, when he finally reveals his identity, his victims learn nothing about his nature, only something about their own; they know how it was possible for them to be deceived but not why he chose to deceive them.  The only answer that any practical joker can give to the question: “Why did you do this?” is Iago’s: “Demand me nothing.  What you know, you know.”

In fooling others, it cannot be said that the practical joker satisfies any concrete desire of his nature; he has only demonstrated the weaknesses of others and all he can now do, once he has revealed his existence, is to bow and retire from the stage.  He is only related to others, that is, so long as they are unaware of his existence; once they are made aware of it, he cannot fool them again, and the relation is broken off.

The practical joker despises his victims, but at the same time he envies them because their desires, however childish and mistaken, are real to them, whereas he has no desire which he can call his own.  His goal, to make game of others, makes his existence absolutely dependent upon theirs; when he is alone, he is a nullity.  Iago’s self-description, I am not what I am, is correct and the negation of the Divine I am that I am.   If the word motive is given its normal meaning of a positive purpose of the self like sex, money, glory, etc., then the practical joker is certainly driven, like a gambler, to his activity, but the drive is negative, a fear of lacking a concrete self, of being nobody.  In any practical joker to whom playing such jokes is a passion, there is always an element of malice, a projection of his self-hatred onto others, and in the ultimate case of the absolute practical joker, this is projected onto all created things.

I find these considerations to be enthralling when I add to them a consideration of our idea of the modern Islamist terrorist.  But maybe in not the way you might think.  The very imposition of enforced rule sets  — autarchy,despotism, and the like — because it is abstract and considers no real human beings with distinct and unique characters, may produce in the object of that imposition a feeling of no-self.  Then, the attempt to manipulate others or play God is the only way these objects can acquire a sense of self-identity: always and only in relation to others.  He has only demonstrated the weaknesses of others — that may be the role the terrorist sees for himself in the world.

But most of us have witnessed examples in our own lives, and, in fact, I dare say that most of us have been practical jokers in our own lives, if only briefly and from time-to-time.  A few things in the above passage stand out for me:

• “But, in most cases, behind the joker’s contempt for others lies something else, a feeling of self-insufficiency, of a self lacking in authentic feelings and desires of its own. The normal human being may have a fantastic notion of himself, but he believes in it; he thinks he knows who he is and what he wants so that he demands recognition by others of the value he puts upon himself and must inform others of what he desires if they are to satisfy them.”
  

This is interesting, because here Auden has made a very particular distinction between the archetypical Practical Joker and everyone else.  Both actually have a sense of gaining understanding of self-worth from being in relation to others, but each approaches such gains differently and in fact gains different things.  The normal person seeks validation of his self-identification, but the Practical Joker seeks out an identity not his own to support his subconscious self-validation of having no self.  But note the last statement, because Auden seems to be asserting that the normal person in fact must gain satisfaction of his desires which he cannot supply on his own: i.e., is not entirely self-sufficient.

We might say that either sees a ‘network’ of relation but that the network means different things to each.  The normal person has a distinct understanding of his own self, his own individuality, and seeks out a relation with others from an awareness of his own character (even if he needs validation), whereas the Practical Joker can only have a sense of connection by focusing entirely upon that network of characters he sees around him.

• “He manipulates others but, when he finally reveals his identity, his victims learn nothing about his nature, only something about their own; they know how it was possible for them to be deceived but not why he chose to deceive them.”

This is because it is in their nature to gain validation of their own preexisting awareness of self.  When they realize they were deceived, they only realize something else about themselves, because it is in their nature to seek satisfaction and validation from others, even from the Practical Joker.  But gaining the new understanding of themselves, they no longer need to maintain such a relation to the Practical Joker.  He has taught them all he can and can no longer validate those parts of them he has revealed, because his only manner of validation is through deception and they can no longer be deceived by him.

This idea also illuminates the power of 4GW fighters.  A constant bombardment of “weaknesses” upon the target may do one of two things.  Either that target forms a self-identity of his own extreme weakness and powerlessness — the 4GW fighter continuously validates that self understanding by revealing to the target that the target is a puppet — and must then withdraw out of fear, or else quite possibly the constant revelation of his own ignorance about himself may over time produce in the target a no-self much like that of the 4GW fighter.  The last thought is troubling, because it suggests that the target of 4GW may come to a place where his own identity can only exist as a result of his relationship to that 4GW fighter; he may have no sense of self outside that dynamic.

• In fooling others, it cannot be said that the practical joker satisfies any concrete desire of his nature; he has only demonstrated the weaknesses of others and all he can now do, once he has revealed his existence, is to bow and retire from the stage.

This one is peculiar because of something written later in the essay, quoted further above.  Auden describes Iago’s behavior as being a kind of scientific enquiry.  Auden has also asserted that the Practical Joker, in order to be effective, must have a very good understanding of his target’s sensibilities, predispositions, etc.  When reading those assertions, I can’t help but think that we all sometimes think of others as objects.  In fact, there are many reasons to believe that this is the only way we can really think of others, since we do not have a direct pipeline into their subjective minds but may only observe their actions and try to determine motivations.  [Explored in more detail in my post on ‘Rethinking the OODA.’]

Thus, we might suppose that the Practical Joker’s method of enquiry leads to the deep understanding of his target’s character, and that the understanding he gains is actually superior to that target’s own understanding of his own character. [It] cannot be said that the practical joker satisfies any concrete desire of his nature — but maybe the successful Practical Joker builds a better abstract of his target than the target may build in the relationship between the two, at least until the Practical Joker has revealed himself and his target’s weaknesses.

The Practical Joker does not entirely validate his target’s sense of self to the best of his ability until the very end, but he may in the meantime purposely validate some things the target already knows about himself.  In so doing, it is almost as if the target is made to leave the ‘network’ while believing he is still connected; he is made to look in a mirror but believes he is seeing another person.  Auden later says in the essay that adequately conveying the Practical Joker in Iago to an audience would require the actor to act two ways in the play.  When he is with other characters on stage, he “must display every virtuoso trick of dramatic technique” because “there are as many ‘honest’ Iagos as there are characters with whom he speaks.”  When he is alone on stage, he must become that nullity mentioned already: stumbling through lines, a non-presence, fumbling and nondescript.

• The practical joker despises his victims, but at the same time he envies them because their desires, however childish and mistaken, are real to them, whereas he has no desire which he can call his own.  His goal, to make game of others, makes his existence absolutely dependent upon theirs; when he is alone, he is a nullity…… the drive is negative, a fear of lacking a concrete self, of being nobody.

We see the tendency for effecting practical jokes in children more often than in adults.  In fact, adults may have a better understanding of the effects of practical jokes, and while they may sometimes fantasize what they could do to a coworker, they may also realized the kind of trouble they might get into if they took things as far as they sometimes dream of taking them.  Children have not only not developed a complete sense and understanding of self but are also making their first strides to connect in relationship to strangers.  Every new school year, with new sets of close acquaintances in small classrooms, introduces some trepidation, and children may be more prone to make enquiries concerning the character of these new acquaintances.  Not all practical jokes are entirely of a concrete nature; creating “drama” via the creation of rumors and lies may serve.  Young adults, upon entering into the workforce for the first time, may also make such experiments — or, in entering bars and nightclubs and the dating game.

I am tempted to suppose that we begin life as manipulators and Practical Jokers and mature by becoming self-aware individuals who nonetheless require validation and a satisfaction for that self from others — rather than identity from others — and that some people fail to mature.  Young or old, we are aware of others, or network, or relation, but in youth this system of relations appears to change very quickly because of the ignorance of youth.  As a youth, I had more difficulty relating; but as an adult, I at least have a very good starting point for relating, because I have a more developed sense of self.  At the same time, as a youth I quickly developed a system of relating to my family, who were always about me and represented a static (thus, dependable) network; later, some friends became that, at least for a time.  But as an adult in the workforce, I have had to contend with shifting relations whether when holding one job or as I switched jobs, as coworkers and employers and customers or clients changed.  As I moved into adulthood, realizing I was gay required me to relate differently with my family:  as my sense and understanding of self grew, I could better pick and choose my relationships and methods of relating, but also, the changing relationships altered less and less that sense of self than when I was a youth.  It is probably this aspect that limits the Practical Joker in me, since a developed sense of self requires much less validation from a network than a developing sense of self requires enquiry and identity which it can only get from networking (via contrast and comparison.)  I.e., not only do I not need as many experiments, but I’m also less susceptible to falling into the traps set by Practical Jokers and perhaps less likely to become like them.

These thoughts leave me thinking that as humans become more self-aware and self-sufficient through enterprise, liberal education, and the benefits of technology, the need for network as a motivating idea for gluing society together will decrease.  But also, these thoughts leave me thinking that the development of such self-sufficiency may require a variety of relations, just as youths require relation to come to an understanding of their selves before self-sufficiency can obtain. As so-called interconnectivity increases, however, the idea of network as a relatively static system of relations will constantly be attacked, making the idea untenable and an insufficient model.  Indeed, the attempt to establish global static relations — Global Network — will produce Practical Jokers of the worst variety, because no such system can adequately address the variety of the parts.  I.e., the attempt to nullify individuals by subsuming them under a system of rule sets not of their own choosing and maintenance — the kind of system that will continue despite them, irrespective of them — will create Practical Jokers whose only self-identified relationship to that system will be to show up its weaknesses.