The Tardation Study: What Rocks Will Eventually Roll

It’s a great old song, jukebox fave for many decades running,  good chance you know it well.

“Good golly Miss Molly

Sure like to ball,

When you’re rockin' and a rollin’

Can’t hear yo’ momma call…”

Even now I’ll turn it up and grin. What’s an open guess is if you know the colloquial meaning of the lyrics. Yup, you guessed it. In America of the nineteen fifties rockin’ and rollin’ was a most literal description of just what it sounds like… good old fashioned get down get after it enthusiastic sex.  Barely twenty years later "rock and roll" was a well recognized genre of music. America went through quite a change across those two decades, and the music of the times reflected them all. Here it is nearly fifty years later and there is still debate on the what's and whys.

Changes… some accidental, some deliberate, some destructive and some benign.  The focus today is the creation of some tool, some convention, to standardize a realistic risk assessment on what comes out the bottom of the "tardation study" machine.  Since most of what will be going in the top will be things involving some form of change it seems a good time to take a look at the concept of "change" as a risk factor.

Very few thing happen instantaneously. There is always a bit of time involved in any change.  From a great many directions it is known key factors in the stress associated to any given change is, of course, the amount of change... and of equal importance how quickly it happened. You can change the orbit of a planet if you do it slowly enough, you can break a jet fighter if you ask it to change directions to quickly.

The study of change is usually in the domain of physics or engineering, matters of physical reality where measurements can be observed and objective fact. Mass and velocity, enthalpy and entropy, things of that sort. Societies on the other hand are composed of people, collections of people where only a portion of the forces impinging on them can be measured in objective fact.  When you’re working with people the subjective elements of opinion and emotion play with just as much force as the physical. The only trustworthy fact to be had is that you'll never have any genuine facts to trust.

In the prior chapter the extremes of humanity’s fate were defined, but how do you quantify a rate of change within a society, a culture? How to define the extremes of change? As the template and texture of life which is a society shifts  between the extremes what is normal and safe as differing from a potentially destructive haste?  To the best of my (admittedly very limited) knowledge no one has ever attempted to set such a value.  I’m not sure if anyone has even seriously attempted to define a unit of measurement. Perhaps someone already has so perhaps someone  can educate me in this, but until or unless someone does I’m compelled to try and invent one.

Taking for my template the rules of physical reality such a unit would be analogous to some known or calculable amount of energy applied to a system containing a defined amount of mass/energy producing an observed amount of change across a set amount of time, the stress within the system as the change is implemented the result of the relative amounts of energies involved.

Translated for working a social system rather than a physical system this becomes some observed amount of change to life and lifestyle (those being the observable manifestations of the same change as it impacts the inner psyche of the individuals) effecting this many people across a set amount of time. An easy enough pairing, even if half of the things mentioned have never been quantified.

Time is perhaps the easiest factor to grapple with since there are several long standing terms oft used: a lifespan (from deep scriptural sources set as three score and ten, 70 years), and a more modern but fairly well verified unit called a passage, a term conveniently one tenth of the former which references cycles of an individual’s psychological and physical maturation. A lifespan, 70 years, and a passage within that life of 7 years.  As an added perk there are definitions assigned to each “passage” that while not exacting and rigid are, more often than not, good ballpark indicators of how several primal facets will shift within an individual across the years.

The basic nature of our interlinked social existences makes it a more difficult challenge to define a unit appropriate to social forces equivalent to mass and/or energy. Shy of totally engineered individuals incarcerated within an externally controlled "society" I'd say it is actually impossible to define such a unit, not that will be accurate regardless of scale, accurate from the individual level to the macroscopic society of man. 

I’ll assert taking modern society for the focus of your thought will require an approach more akin to thinking fluid dynamics from a chaotic (non linear dynamic) perspective than approaching from more Newtonian perspectives. It makes a better analogy to compare each individual to a molecule within a fluid system of various such molecules some of which only exist in the same time/space universe for very brief moments. More than a few of the concepts have easily seen analogies to the behavior of individuals within the various social systems.

So, which of the concepts from these very subtle subjects are worth pirating to assist in the study of 'tardation, why are they worth stealing, and once stolen how should they be reinterpreted to fit the task at hand?

The concepts I’d pirate are those associated with compression and expansion as applied to the pressures and temperatures of a volatile open system. Those concepts more than any others would seem to encompass what is needed to define the critical properties of a system as volatile as a society where the driving force is some mixture of people’s only partially understood emotional state. Not only are the concepts an excellent fit to the dynamics of a social system there’s even a chance some of the associated mathematical functions might make the jump as well if an appropriately adjusted scale can be established.

Ok, if you've hung in this long it's very likely you're thinking something along the lines of "either get his car keys or take the damn bong away from him and substitute black coffee for the bottle of rum, one or the other, just don't leave the situation as it is."  Fair enough, I'll (temporarily) surrender the car keys, and share the rum because I want to ramble a bit on where these thoughts lead, I want to reset my frame and focus.

To truly see a society from the outside is to shift the spectrum of your vision, allow yourself to perceive a different form of energy. You are no longer looking at some fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum reflected or refracted, no, you are looking at energies generated along the interface of the emotional and the actual. Let your vision, your perception, register the shifts of fad and fashion, of belief and bigotry and the image takes on Doppler color: the bright blues of the arriving, the red shift of the departing intermixed in waves of continual motion, a tumbling vivid abstraction like a 1960’s psychedelic poster. See the hopes and fears fad and fashion tap for energy and the image reveals depth in more than three dimensions, the vision begins to look like multi-colored clouds boiling up and crashing down across a planet that shifts from hot to frigid every few hundred miles, a whirling dance of lightning and whirlwind carving the land below into ever stranger shapes.

The meteorology of the social atmosphere is a rather pretty abstraction, and in point of fact a rather violent thing. The energies which make it pretty are still energies which, if out of balance, can wreak far more havoc on the human condition than any hurricane ever spawned. The task at hand is to understand enough, not all by any manner of means but enough, to begin the process of determining what is safe and what is not, what will generate catastrophe as opposed to harmless consternation.

Before I call it a day and post this, leave you to whatever thoughts it might have inspired (or a snort from above mentioned bong/bottle to help dissolve it all away), allow me to give a short example of a translation of the sort needed, an example based on an equation almost as ubiquitous as Albert's famous e = mc², to wit, the perfect gas law: P = VrT.

Four terms: P for pressure, V for volume, T for temperature and r, a constant representing the specific properties of the gas in question. Needless to say (for those who've bumped into this little gem before) establishing a true and accurate value for little "r" when these concepts are applied to the vapor of humanity would have to be the holy grail of all ambitions, but anyway.

Take hope for example. What happens when you compress hope, squeeze it into a smaller volume, a smaller container, a smaller chance of becoming reality? Of course. Same hope, smaller chances, the pressure is going to go up and with the rise in pressure a rise in temperature.  Anger appears on the scene, initially a diffused and ill-defined anger souring the experience of life. Continue compressing the hope and the anger grows all the hotter and begins to find focus. Compress things hard enough and the temperature will exceed what is needed for ignition. Result? What history calls violent revolution. 

Consider the opposite case when some social system is allowed to expand into a larger volume. The pressure goes down, the temperature falling in lockstep. The system becomes energy hungry, begins drawing in from other systems around it. It becomes the cool spot the heat heads for.  All well and good, as long as it doesn’t siphon off so much energy as to generate resentment. If some system is subjected to an  unlimited expansion one of two scenarios presents: it must either become a pirate on the macroscopic system or eventually freeze, crystallize and cease to be.

Putting numbers to what common sense can see will have to wait on next time, my fingers are going numb. But numbers of some sort are what’s needed to produce results beyond coffee shop guess and go look, it’s a job that needs doing.

Via con dios, catch ya’ll later.