MCCAIN AND OBAMA—CAN THEY COLLAPSE THE WAVE?

Can John McCain or Barack Obama master their fate?  Can they collapse the wave?  Both presumptive presidential candidates are the product and the shaper of their times.  Each has a vision and a campaign to project that vision onto present-day socio-political-economic events.  How much are they chosen to play these forces and how much can they shape them?

 Thinking about this, a “man of action” like John McCain will actually be a man of reaction.  So many of the threats he perceives result from his having been raised to think of war as service, a positive force for change, and yet a reaction to threats—real or perceived—to the security of the nation and all its special interests.  McCain is reacting to what surrounds him.  He is not a leader but a politician.  He asks everyone for advice and changes tactics on the fly.  Because of this, a negativity pervades his campaign that seeks to suppress difference, dialog, the vote, and to promote special interests.  We know what he is against far more than what he is for.  He is focused and secure relative to challenges to US authority.  He is unfocused and insecure about managing change and diversity, deferring instead to a laissez-faire market economy.  This comes from an uncreative judgmental, opinionated, and reflexive mentality.  How does this differ from the approach of Barack Obama?

A broad world-view or weltanschauung projects itself onto the cosmology of interactive forces in a dynamic flux of variants and force in the personality of Barack Obama.  There is little emotion, divisive opinionating, or reflexive reaction in the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party.  A product of his time, Obama appears to enjoy being “plugged in.”  He is aware of and takes advantage of electronic media because it comprises his universe.  Obama reflects upon the energies of these interactive variables, attempts to order them in unique ways, then strips the abstraction from the conceptual fabric to reveal a clear structure, simply and clearly explicated.  The ideas are complex—their expression is not.

 By showing the public how quickly he and his campaign staff reflect, reshape, and recreate the attacks made upon him the style as well as the substance of the leadership potential Obama possesses are revealed.  The most refreshing thing to me as a political junky and a psychologist is the direct way Obama answers questions.  I can see the thought processes, the logic, the options considered, the stress on understanding, out of which emerges a nuanced and subtle approach to the multi-leveled attempts by the opposition to shape his responses.

It is more than reactivity because all of his responses come from a well thought out sub-structure alloyed with a penchant for clearly communicating what is on his mind.  This is the difficulty opponents have with him.  By understanding the pokes and jabs he feints and thrusts with authority.  Like the Jedi Knights of Lucas-lore, Obama intuitively grasps the largest situations and can move fluidly within this cosmic array in an intelligent manner.

 

In so doing, Barack belies his multi-cultural heritage and his life-experience in the Far East, Kansas, and Hawaii through his dual African-American eyes in the truest sense of the word. Obama is a first-generation African-American.  But, this sensibility is wedded to a Harvard Law education and a University of Chicago professorial focus on the American constitution.

 

If anyone can perform on the highest level with the greatest depth it is Barack Obama.  He thinks in the present with concepts birthed in the cauldron of the genesis of American democracy.  If anything, Obama is a clear counterpart to the wisdom expressed in McCain’s candidacy.  Both have merit.  Both Obama and McCain can perceive the future.  McCain represents a history of independence that has propelled the US into the 21^st century with a focus on domination.  Obama reflects the diversity of his time and the control over electronic media that will be the future heritage of our maturing nation, making it again a leader by example.  Both men are collapsing the wave of probability proclaimed by the quantum theorists to be the mechanics of creation.  It is up to the forces to redistribute themselves—but through whose eyes?

MIND SHAPES PROBABILITY

mind shapes probability

It’s been awhile since the last entry.  Life has intervened.  Time is ever-shifting, a metaphor and a fact.  We are all in a bubble.  Somewhere, sometime, different bubbles intersect and then we share a coherent spacetime with another.  Like the traveler in Einstein’s train, we are moving and not moving at the same time.  When time stands still we may be moving faster than we ever have, or so slowly it seems the event horizon stretches to beyond the blue horizon.

 The questions I have raised in this blog are speculative and limited.  Mathematics is the new language of science.  Rolled-up dimensions in a super-symmetric Calabi-Tau three-fold cannot be observed.  So I content myself with star gazing.  Luckily there is no dearth of images downloaded from earth-bound and satellite observation platforms (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/).  I can almost make out in the rain bands of our hurricanes patterns similar to galaxies shaped by forces I can only imagine.  My mind wants to see correlations between rain bands and an ego sending energy out into multidimensional spacetime.  Will the force of mind coalesce into droplets of intense focused consciously created reality?  Will what I think collapse waves of quantum energy, creating a world because I can think it?  Was Descartes correct?  This puts a spin on creativity.  Up till now I believed creativity took pre-existing elements and reshaped them into new patterns.  Why stop there? Living in a universe both macro and micro, should not even a whiff of suspicion be given to probability, a kind of Feynmanian exploration of the infinite mathematical chances a subatomic particle can enter/re-enter our universe?

What if mind shapes probability?  Just see any kung fu movie, watch any basketball game, listen to any music, look at any painting, photograph, dance, and the It (Das Es—Freud’s concept of the id) is projected onto it. We see what we want to, and the patterns emerge.  Consciousness alerts us to potential intuitively.  Is this mathematical?  It is like saying action consists of organized macroparticles, that we can “play ball” indicates a playful balance between the ball and all the tricks the hitters, runners, fielders, pitchers and catchers can do with it.  How else do you spell “momentum?”  Control is only part of momentum.  Fielding a ball is too complex for simple models—the metaphor forces break-downs when too many variables come into play and analogies no longer describe.  But mathematics may provide a way through if there is a computer fast enough to compute all the variables.  Why is it a great player must first learn to control the forces but must stop thinking to produce the best play?  As if conscious behavior can only take us so far.  To perform on the highest level an athlete or an artist may find themselves a small part of a larger energy that has the momentum to carry them along.  At this point we cannot as shapers of destiny change more than our relation to the forces.  By setting up energy, the actor shapes a continuum.  By riding a wave, a surfboarder becomes the wave.