Hi there Mr. Howell --
Your remark,
> > Sometimes I get the feeling that
> > there is an "inner circle" within this group that polices what goes on
> > here.
...is an extraordinarily important one. Symbolically, it represents the
origins -- the mythological origins -- of a very wide range of political
movements and actions.
As Rick explained in his response to this same post, there is no inner
circle. But (and this is my personal contribution to the thread) there
*is*, most definitely, an *emergent* sort of rationality, an *apparent*
coherence, to the statistically averaged responses -- or lack or responses
-- of this entire group.
This is our human -- if I may be allowed to call it this --
"suprarationality". From one perspective, it's nothing but statistics:
unpredictably, without advance warning or explicit coordination, the group
omits responding to some particular post. From another, it's a profoundly
meaningful group statement.
This second perspective is not easily explicable these days. The root
paradigm is something like: a group, a community, within which someone
says something wierd, and the community simply *doesn't_respond." Period.
Personally, I feel that the only context in which we can make sense of
patterns like this, is mythology. Suppose, for example, that there were
an "inner circle" that did not know what it was doing? That did not know
it was inner? Whose members had no explicit or rational discourse amongst
themselves? Made no communal decisions?
In our deciding what to say and what not to say, what myths do we
instantiate?
--
Regards
Jim Michmerhuizen jamzen@world.std.com
The Residence is at http://world.std.com/~jamzen/
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