Bold Millennium

"Bold Millennium" seeks to assemble understandings by treating issues of behavioral opportunities in terms of interactions between individuals, groups, and ideas as actors, in a world context, introducing an interpretive technique from anthropology known as "symbolic displacement." Symbolic representations serve the purpose of recognizing value as intrinsic to such symbols, in the sense that validates behavioral opportunities (such as trading), inherent to employing these symbols as messaging entities, while discarding the irrelevant, such as bulk, the destruction of environmental equilibria associated with production, or inconvenient time-scales, such as the perishable nature of a commodity. Nonetheless, today the trade of symbolic displacements is proving increasingly unsatisfactory, in that the nominally irrelevant is seen as ever more threatening side-effects, apparently impossible to eliminate. Climate change dominates the lime-light on today's public stage. A better-known example of symbolic displacements is terminology that displaces a source of energy with concepts of credit; in social settings the latter are more handily traded than a direct bartering of coal or oil. Other advantages inherent to symbolic displacement consist in decoupling such symbols from traditional conceptual perspectives bound to strong emotional commitments enshrined in these traditions. An example, again from economics: a payment in hand offers no clue as to the manner by which the energy source it displaced was procured. Such decoupling assumes its more notable benefits in freeing interactions involving symbolically displaced things from the irrelevant, which may involve nonsensical time-scales or cultural differences tied to irreconcilable traditions, as seen in discord that arises during interactions between distinct cultures that share little if any behavioral congruence. By calling on symbolic displacement the essay bypasses the parochial constraints, thereby facilitating the construction of understandings built, focusing on more basic underlying social dynamics. As there cannot be any assurance that a selected collection of characteristics will achieve the goals sought, the symbolisms implementing a selected displacement may be cast into distinct alternate ensembles, the differences between them arising from the diversity of formulations, where each generates insights along different perspectives that occasionally yield access to surprisingly remote and yet distinctly valid, promising horizons. These are cast into tomographies, as medicine employs this methodology, procuring thereby to preserve intrinsic diagnostic value. As developed here, the topics examined via tomographies rely on conceptual tools inherent to complexity theory, structured via tools drawn from the theory of information of Claude Shannon, applied to probabilistic descriptions of state changes as observed in social interactions. For illustrative purposes, insights of modern investigators and commentators of the human condition are examined, comparatively as well as in a complementary sense, combining concepts developed by Richard Alley, Antonio Damasio, Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, Mircea Eliade, Thomas Friedman, Francis Fukuyama, Carl G. Jung, Stuart Kauffman, Konrad Lorenz, Margaret Mead, Orlando Patterson, Karl Popper, John Rawls, Arnold Toynbee, and Muhammad Yunus, among others. The brief introductory exposition this essay develops introduces interpretive tools, such as a dual-paradigm methodology, devised and demonstrated to achieve these ends, though in its current form cannot offer more than a preliminary glimpse into the possibilities inherent the proposed paradigm. The aim sought is an introductory exploration. Later tertulias may then expose further merits and/or limitations implicit in the currently presented beginnings, suggestive of a promising gamut of potential commitments into an almost limitless human future.