An Evolving Systems Analysis of Sandy Hook
Sandy Hook in a New Light:
Lately I find myself attempting to fit both personal experience and global events into a General Systems framework. General Systems Theory is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry pioneered by biologist Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy. It seeks to expound principles that are applicable to a whole variety of systems, including social systems.
So what, if anything, can Systems Analysis reveal to us about an event such as the Sandy Hook Massacre? What good could possibly come out of such a disorienting debacle? Is it just another sign of how rotten the world is, or can we take a step back and somehow tease out a silver-lining?
We have to approach these sorts of questions with a non-linear brand of logic. It is necessary to leave our dogmatic assumptions at the door. In doing so, we are able to accept that notions of direct causality and random occurrences are illusory within the context of complex, chaotic systems. There are no isolated, meaningless accidents in an open and interconnected world. The collective inertia of human culture is being drawn to what might be called a strange attractor; a destination point.
As fractured constituents of the whole, it is understandably difficult for us to comprehend this larger picture. Regardless, the natural trajectory of ecological systems including our own is toward ever-increasing efficiency, cooperation, and adaptability. Hidden order is nature’s rule, not some special case.
As we continue to develop, mistakes and contentiousness should be expected and thought of as necessities for progress. They are not unpleasant experiences to be avoided. They exist within models of complex systems because they serve as positive feedback mechanisms; they help regulate interdependent ecologies like ours. Over the long term, the dialectic process serves to increase the system’s integrity and stability.
I think most of us understand that we learn and grow wise through both direct experience and peer-to-peer interaction. Sometimes the experience is painful, or uncomfortable, but it is not without merit. With this in mind, we can come to comprehend tragedies such as Sandy Hook and the rabid debates surrounding them on a deeper level. These types of events are in fact turbulent fluctuations that, in time, add up to the constructive reordering of society as we know it. They serve to lead us into a new maturity as a species.
We are witnessing this primordial process play itself out via the flurry of online, wildcat journalism revolving around the Sandy Hook story. We have seen an unprecedented cascade of bi-directional information flow. Abundant dialogue and grassroots intelligence-gathering is emerging from all sides of the issue.
Because our social order is an embedded part of the planet’s ecology, we are unwittingly subject to its flows and processes. This is not to say we are deterministic slaves. Rather, we have the choice to act in accordance with the ebbs and flows of nature or we can choose to vainly struggle against them. We can either co-create or self-destruct.
But before I get too far ahead of myself, let me first dissect the evidence surrounding the December 14th shooting. Since mid-December, it has morphed into a truly surreal and polarizing storyline that has yet to produce a completely coherent narrative or body of evidence. A plethora of logical and evidentiary inconsistencies have cropped up all over the place. These clear patterns of contradiction should give us serious pause; enough so to demand a careful reconsideration of the official story.
Dissecting the Event:
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