piaget + bohm

When we are infantile, we perceive the world in terms of transformations and continuity. When someone's head disappears behind the playpen wall, it no longer exists. And when someone's arms extend from behind a tree trunk, they are part of that tree trunk. And when that tree appears fairy-sized beside our hand, it is not because the tree is far away, but because you have discovered its untouchable miniature right in our presence. A thing happens to us between this time and adulthood that morphs that cononical perception into an interspersed mass of objects and interactions. Language.

Particularly Indo-European languages (English, French, German, etc.) are primarily based on nouns. We think, communicate and perceive based on what language has done to our interaction with the world. We fragment its natural cohesion just by the way we behold it.

Language was once verb-based... transformation-based. Native American languages, Bengali and other endangered linguistics. These were also peoples who interacted with reality as if it were all actualized in the same condition, and from the same piece of cloth and ultimately still cohesive.

plasma + marxism

A cyclotron accelerator strips atoms of their outer electrons, leaving them with a positive charge. The resulting melange of free electrons and positively charges atoms is called plasma.

Plasma functions in a collective way, oscillating as a whole, yet its components move freely and individually. When two electrons are completely isolated, they maintain an interaction over a long distance. But in a plasma, this long-range interaction is shielded by the presence of an astronomical number of additional particles. Because this demands that all particle interactions become short range, electrons move freely within the collective, with individual movements.

The long-range interaction, however, has not completely vanished. Rather, its shadowed impetus is what allows the plasma to behave coherently.

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If a society could behave like a plasma, an ideal balance between serving oneself and one's community would emerge. Capitalism brags that it achieves this balance of perfect individual freedom experienced while serving the common good. Pragmatically speaking, however, capitalism exists only in the hope that service to the common good might somehow be fomented from claustrophobic nests of self-committed individuals.