Chaos Theory Requires Systemic Change:  Obama Bring It On!

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

  Who hasn’t pondered why both economic and political theory are bankrupt and becoming ever more self-destructive in the modern world?  One answer may be found in the New York Times article of June 8th, 2008, Slipstream, by John Markoff, “Nature Gave Him a Blueprint, but Not Overnight Success.”  Markoff writes, “Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.  Even in fields such as the computer industry, which celebrates innovation, systemic change can be glacial.  Persons and institutions look for change in modes that they can understand.”  Sounds like the old conundrum of the chicken and the egg. 

  Two solutions have been waiting in the wings for many decades.  Bring on the binary economic rooster (see http://www.cesj.org and www.americanrevolutionaryparty.us ) and its normative-law twin in the pursuit of transcendent justice as long-range solutions to be started now while the world runs down to the point where the growing global chaos can no longer be ignored and a fundamental paradigm shift must occur in accordance with basic chaos theory.

  In the field of normative law, which has been essentially dead for six hundred years among Muslims, the atomic bomb may be to augment or replace the ancient schools of law (madhdhahib), all of which were created not to innovate but to consolidate taqlid (copying the past) as a means to apply law in the service of stability without any higher purpose.  What started out as the pursuit of alternative paths to justice ended up as barriers to it.  This inhuman dead end in all human thought is the root of all terrorism and terroristic counter-terrorism.

  The unsurpassed example of such suicidal self-destruction is the new book by Amitai Etzioni, entitled Security First.  His basic premise advanced for a new American foreign policy under Barak Obama differs from the NeoCons’ alleged ideological pragmatism only in Etzioni’s call for a moral foundation based on communitarian concern for others as a justification for unilaterally imposing order on the world through the support of dictators around the world who reject his moral foundation but like his conclusions. 

  The theme of Etzioni’s new book is that the pursuit of security for others justifies our claim to moral legitimacy.  This was the missing element in the now outdated ideology known as NeoConservative Tribalism.  Etzioni ignores the elemental fact that the missing dimension of both his and the NeoCons’ grand strategy is compassionate justice as the only reliable source of stability for anyone.  See the amazing reviews of Etzioni’s new book in the house organ, Survival, of the premiere British think tank, The International Institute for Strategic Studies, April/May 2008, and in Contemporary Sociology, May 2008, available online from .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

  The world is collapsing into self-destructive entropy.  Where are the negentropic roosters with the vision to develop a new paradigm as suggested in the think-piece, entitled “Transcendent Law: Toward a New Paradigm of Civilization,” which opened the convention in London on May 23, 2008, of the Global Civilizations Study Centre and was posted the same day in http://www.theamericanmuslim.org. 

  This kind of paradigmatic revolution motivated America’s Founders, as it did President Ronald Reagan, who called for a “Second American Revolution.”  It also clearly motivates the product of the current revolution in America embodied in Barak Obama.  He could become the rooster that solves the dilemma of the chicken and the egg.  His first hundred days may give the answer.  If Obama could tame the Chicago Mafia, the special interests of Washington could be child’s play.  A second American revolution of systemic change?  Obama, bring it on.