A fractal has been defined as "a rough or fragmented geometric object that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced size copy of the whole", a property called self-similarity.
If that does not make any sense to you, perhaps Ben McLeish explains it better than I can in this part of this lecture on science.
And let me tell you why this concept is relevant to know about. Because other than the fact that fractals clearly do exist in nature, which is profound when you first think of it, you will recognise that fractals exist not only in snow flakes but in many intangible areas as well. Such as science, technology, philosophy, engineering, economics and so forth.
This becomes interesting when you start to see how nature is being intelligent in its design.
Any chemist will tell you that the universe consists of atoms (and smaller parts that I do not understand well enough to bring into the equation), and these atoms all try to achieve a specific binding with other atoms to attain sustainability. All the cells in your body work towards the common goal of sustaining your existance as the host. Its a family effort you could say. Now if you scale out, you could see how each of your organs do the same thing. None of them work with the intention of harvesting all the nutrients for themselves. They share because that is how they would optimally get by. It would be sustainable only for a temporary period to exhibit different behaviour for the body. You would certainly start to break down, even if it did boost your performance in certain areas initially, had your body been in a capitalist system of self-maximisation. You will have guessed by now where I am going with this.
But instead of preaching about some higher community construct of society, where everyone shares everything and work to reduce understood infections, delivering the community or host body from "diseases" like crime and greed, I will try something different and leave this part of my fractal theory incomplete.
Instead we take a few steps outwards and look at how the larger order of things fit into this picture. In the animal kingdom you might think you have a counter-argument to this in the fact that other species also exhibit the asocial behaviour of over-acquisition. This is true, but if you saw the post from yesterday featuring a link to a lecture by Robert Sopalski, you will recall what he said that the groups of animals that end up working together are those with stronger communities. Without having seen all of it, I believe he debates the same issues in this lecture.
Furthermore the earth is a closed system. The resources that we are using at ever-accelerating rates now took millions of years to develop into what we see today, and if you look at fossil fuels like oil it is quite evident that in less than 300 years we will have completely drained out this resource.
The stardust we know as planets also work in a looping and self-similar way. Most people know that all planets and moons follow paths around the sun and each other. I am not sure how this works, but I would venture the guess that a planet has to stay in its course. The ultimate self-correcting system perhaps.
This is where we would start a lot of guess work, and while this work is by no means scientific, I did think it was an interesting train of thought, so I wanted to share it with you. It could be that the answer to a lot of the social problems this blog, and a growing part of the world, is concerned with lie within many of the systems that our most intelligent minds already understand. Maybe the self-similarity is too obvious to consider applicable to society as a whole.
Am I proposing that crime be viewed by society in the same way disease is viewed by the immune system? I could be.
A very well-written and interesting book comparing a societal state to a physical disease is, and the name is the brilliant part, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism by John McMurtry.
The introduction in the preface really describes well how the writer came to the conclusion that there might be something to this similarity across the various categories of systems. Physically and conceptually.
The title of this book is not a provocative metaphor. It is the conceptual outcome of long personal experience and deep-structural social investigation over 30 years of research across disciplinary boundaries. During this period, I have been involved with my brother, a medical researcher, in ongoing co-investigation of pathogenic patterns at the highest level of abstraction. I have also been the husband of the mother of my four children who was overwhelmed by deadly anaplastic cancer, and a serious student of a non-lethal carcinogenic invasion of my own body. These prolonged events of learning life and death sequences of disease and immune responses have led to the deepening recognition of common principles of growth and disease between social and cellular life-organization.
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