Temporal
Deterministic Dualism
or the return of God
in the social sciences.
By
C.
(published
for The Order of Time)
Abstract:
This article describes the foundations,
reality, fears and implementation of a new
dualism of time-management in the post-modern
era.
Contents:
What
is it?
Dualism
Big
Brother
How
realistic is this
Liberation
Implementation
Prospects
What
is it?
In his
sociological
tour trough
cyberspace
prof. K . mentions the temporal
determinism
of social scientists involved with the factor of
time as a social determinant. The idea of
temporal determinism is not new. The early
catholic
St.
A.
defied
the cyclic concept of
time
as a threat of demoniac determination preparing
for the modernist electromagnetic serial
repression of Newtonian time: his morale was
'each day a new one and don't look back'. With
C.
J.,
the psychoanalyst it was called synchronicity:
the reality of human alignment to the moment in
the here and now of the collective
(un)consciousness that drives people without
them knowing it into the hands of a common
archetypical drive. Mankind could be possessed
by demons or a higher drive of human nature and
the purpose of the analytic therapy was to bring
these drives into the conscious. Also
S.F.
worked with the temporal hypothesis supposing
the conditionings
of youth
would be of serious relevance to the make-up of
the mature psyche with all its repressions and
compensations. This early psychotherapeutic
claim of psychoanalysis was later rationalized
and reformulated by the behaviorist
investigating all the contingencies of
conditioned human behavior in order to get a
conscious grip on it in therapy. Philosophically
we find this determinism with philosophers as
R.
S.,
who called it morphogenetic
resonance
and M.
F. who
spoke of the epistème
or
spirit of the Time that would drive humanity on
a frequency of time with which one only, from a
later period in human history, could make it an
object of reasoning stepping out of it as a deus
ex machina. Temporal determinism offers us the
problem of consciousness: how can we be in
conscious control of what we are doing when we
are controlled by the time we are living? We are
all aligned to the collective, we are all part
of the epistème, the spirit of the time,
we all experience morphogenetic resonance or the
effect of the trauma's of war and sexual
uncontrol in our youth ('from the 'sexual
revolution'). This is the problem: only
afterwards we can explain for what happened to
us. Only afterwards we can be objective and
detached. Only after the evil is done we can
repent and realize what our mistakes were. This
is temporal determinism. This problem of
determinism is an old theme of philosophy and
the social sciences. Do we have a free will or
are we all driven by the forces of history
unable to come to grips with it and determine
our own destiny?
Dualism
From the
cartesian
method
we learn to deal with problems systematically.
The problem of free will or temporal determinism
can thus be analyzed to its constituents, be
assigned to a problem solving order and be
effectuated holistically to incorporate as many
elements as possible. From this classic method
of scientific approach to an originally
theological discussion about the freedom of the
human being relating to God, we realize that
without theologic fundamentalism, freudian
repression, jungian mysticism, behavioristic
reductionism or philosophic pessimism we can
arrive at a holistic conclusion to the reality
of this entrapment in time. Simply respecting
the facts of modern society we see that step by
step social determinism is losing its monothetic
dominance. No longer is there a single lead of
time in modern multicultural society. To each
religion there are several calendars of
festivities and meditations on sacred
time
relativizing one another for the sake of our
freedom of choice. Political standard time with
its formal option of control these days is just
a public notion of time that wouldn't really
bear a serious consequence on our private
subcultural lives provided the modern
consciousness of emancipation and
self-realization (see a psychologist if you
don't know). The modern man learned to settle
his own schemes and agenda. Society has become a
supermarket of time-choices. Modern management
in the commercial sphere learned to give up
authoritarian claims of control over their
employees for the sake of a liberalization in
the settings of the personal times of work. Step
by step mankind learned to respect what the
Bible told us about exerting power by means of
time-control: changing one another the settings
of time we are of the beast (according to
D.'s
dream
beast no 4) and are to be abolished from formal
politics. No government changing the settings of
time can keep office. All one can do is
individually or subculturally learning to cope
with the entropic mess of time-management around
the world. This is the new duality: we have
the
formal system that ran into
chaos,
and we have the private subcultural option to
settle for our own 'sacred' times of
living.
Big
Brother
The social
experiment in Holland in the fall of 1999 called
'Big Brother' shows the effect of this duality:
the mediashow from the broadcasting company
V.
[now Y]
about a group of people isolated from the
informationculture and its temporal determinants
offers the same dualistic liberation: abolishing
clocks from the association and denying all (?)
standardtime-management access to the
association one realizes a new concept of social
control that disproves the actual necessity of
all privacy (for at least three months provided
a certain type of social stamina). All one would
need is a socially scientific form of
information-overload-protection and control by
camera's making a 'glass eye of God'-culture
(including the loudspeaker-voice of 'God'
speaking from the sky). And this is not just an
isolated experiment. Webcams are a reality of
internet and telephones give us words without
faces from 'the GSM-sky'. Local politics
consider positioning camera's all around town to
register streetviolence. Older people are
offered the newest direct silent alarm to the
police station to feel safe on the streets.
Social control is digitalizing (an
accepted verb!).
No longer we are dictated by an authority. We
are just given limits that would give clarity
about sanctions on transgression and offense or
loyalty and service. No one tells us anymore
what to do, we are simply socially conditioned
behavioristically. Not even forms need to be
filled in or taxes would be needed to be paid
then. We are digitally controlled. Each
transgression is registered. No crime goes
unseen. God is back in the community! Arisen
from His religious and philosophical death. A
new concept of freedom is realized within the
limits set by the subculture or even the law as
far as it attained democratic dominance. If we
go against 'Big Brother' we are abolished from
his paradise of economic and informational
protection. We are 'assimilated and resistance
is futile' is the nightmare.
The reality is that we are with God again as the
social scientist learned to understand from the
scriptures and are thus liberated from
impositions of time and eventual economic duties
like paying taxes or working for a material
result. The price is our privacy and the
liberation is in the new duality to our own
freedom of will: we can choose to participate
and retrieve the lost benefits of an acceptable
and pleasant form of social control or go
against this social scientist control and be
abolished from the reinforced association,
thrown back into the old fashioned pool of
social chaos, lacking social control, increasing
crime, dictates of material labor and
obligations of taxes and social security with
the constant threat of economic collapse.
How
realistic is this Liberation?
The
post-modern realization of temporal
deterministic dualism as a phenomenon of the
control of the social sciences that would align
us with age-old concepts of social control
formerly
respected
religiously,
seems to offer a paradise of freedom against a
possible nightmare from which there is no
escape. The nightmare is quickly debunked as
delusional since the
very idea of dualism denies the reality of a
dictature.
The real dictature is in the delusion that
suggests that there wouldn't be an alternative
to choose from. The very duality assures us of
the conscience of the social scientist. They do
not make an isolated controlroom in the heavenly
sky at the right hand of God. No they are just
civil servants without a government dictated by
consumers who have a market-say in the services
they offer. The social scientist serves the
people with the control and protection the
people demand for and respond to. The ones
conditioning are conditioned themselves by offer
and demand. Thus the market is. We may be afraid
of sadomasochistic tendencies of populistic
control in the style of the old roman arena that
would scream for the blood of christians thrown
to the gladiators or lions (in this case
B.B.-control through camera's). But it is what
the people want. It is still the peoples
consumer-dictated democracy. The scientists only
have to refuse services which they think are
immoral or damaging (to their own good calling)
as they know how far people can go given false
authority. The real question is 'do we dare to
look in the mirror of our own (social) desires
and needs?', are we ready for this upcoming
temporal deterministic dualism? Evolution will
inevitably give the answer: some are, others not
and never will one system rule the whole world.
That is the dualism and the safeguard of escape.
One freedom exists in contrast with the other.
One set of rules makes sense relative to
an
other.
A restless soul simply would wander from one
option to the other finding peace according to
his own nature. The gestalt
therapist F.P.
called it 'in and out of my garbage pail';
selfrealization is your own business only making
sense getting in and out of it.
Implementation
To the realism
of the post-modern duality of private
realization against formalistic chaos there are
clear implementations of the theory. At The
Order of Time there is the suggestion of a
'Cakra'
tempometer
that would offer a comprehensive approach to all
possible options of time-control in such a way
that each individual can have his/her own unique
respect of time, without losing a common
'astrarium'-ground for the sake of social order.
This 'Cakra' concept is perfectly dualistic in
the full sense as described above. But this
concept is an idealistic apollonian dream. It is
theoretically the best and most integer
approach, but it offers, apart from the digital
display of one's own time, a clock from which no
one can tell the time anymore: one sees where
the earth, the sun and the stars are, but one
cannot put it in words anymore, for that we have
the display with the second time. The device
differentiates that well to the moment that for
a year long each indication of time is
different. At best people will maintain to it
another calendar for getting control over their
media (t.v.-standard)-dependency and set a
reference-clock to the regularity of the sun by
means of a table with the
equation of
time.
This simple solution also offers the duality and
consciousness sought for without further
innovation. The tempometer [in full
ornate] is just there for our scientific
honor. To the common man a simple trick of
reference is enough. This was also understood by
the
swiss watchmaker
S.
offering a new type of internet world time
dividing the day in 1000 beats, not really
making a difference with the already existing
standard reference of world time Greenwich (UTC)
was making. The idea was to offer an alternative
scale to the concept of worldtime to promote the
duality necessary for the control over our
(informational) destinies. In the
discussion
with The Order
of Time (Formerly: The Order) these parties were
not doubting the dualism or the realism or
feasibility of the designs. The argument was
whether the public would want such an idealistic
concept in the form of a 'Cakra'-tempometer or
whether they would fancy a (also out of
discussion) new scale of Greenwich UTC worldtime
fixed on the clockmakers location in Switzerland
('Biel-time'). The Order of Time couldn't
guarantee an economic success and thus the
discussion ended failing in public
responsibility about this discussion (what does
an engineer do with a psychologist?). The
consumer and the economy dictates, as we saw
above and the scientist is just another civil
servant (for his own paradigmatic
governing).
Prospects
From the
idealistic point of view we can be elated: we
found God back in the social sciences and we
have a realistic chance of recovering lost
concepts of wanted and appreciated social
control. From the realistic point of view though
there are many hindrances. If it is just the
social scientist that realizes the alignment
with the original order, it is not difficult to
see things running out of hand in a populistic
hunt for the sensation of intruding into the
private sphere of others. Does the alternative
of social control giving up privacy really offer
us the security we want? Or is it the new
clothes of the emperor? As yet we are in the mid
of this temporal deterministic dualistic
transition and the outcome is uncertain. Sure is
that we have an evolutionary need for more
differentiation with an as well modern
('Biel-time) as historic (think of the sundial)
alternative for our existing time-policies to
gain control over our destinies. Whether mankind
will be willing though to accept the real rules
and precepts of the ancient concept of social
control is the question: a new time also gives a
new discipline to which maybe only a rare soul
would fully comply. A hermit might succeed, but
the collective might fall into just another war
about just another argument.
C.,11-10-'99
- See
also 'A
small Philosophy of
Association'
further elborating on the concept of
duality.
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Order of Time: no publication elsewhere without
permission.