[ 10/October/22 – response to Deb’s facebook page on triangles and narcissism ]
Look just at the top horizontal line.
There is the outer triangle, the left one, the middle one, the right one, the one made from the combination of the left and middle and the one made from the right and middle.
That is 6.
That pattern repeats 4 times down the image.
24 triangles.
Everyone is far more complex than any simple label can indicate.
We all have our moments of any characteristic we can recognise.
Every response is appropriate to some set of contexts (but maybe not the one it is being expressed in).
The really massive problem we face, is that for the most part our responses are selected for us by various sets of subconscious mechanisms, and those mechanisms have been tuned by the deep time of our evolutionary and cultural history, none of which contained most of the technologies we have present today or coming in the very near future.
So often, in today’s contexts, those subconscious automatic responses that we all need for survival, are no longer appropriate to the contexts we find ourselves in.
This is a deeply complex suite of issues.
Over simplifying it does not help.
Any attempt to do so will end badly.
It will require the highest levels of awareness and response we are each capable of, and however high that is, we will all make mistakes – so we need to cut everyone a little bit of room for error, and help out where and when required.
The rate of change is accelerating.
This is actually required for our long term survival.
We need as many people as possible to understand the fundamental reality of complex evolutionary systems, that cooperation is fundamental to long term survival, and that any system built on a purely competitive basis is necessarily destructive of both liberty and complexity.
Competition is only survivable if it is firmly built on a cooperative base. Economists, and political and military strategists generally, are yet to understand this biological and strategic reality.
Ted Howard NZ's Blog 