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Saturday, July 23, 20051122126300
SecretWarriors Walk Without Rhythm, Won't Attract the Worm
"Rhythm," The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, 2004, http://www.answers.com/rhythm&r=67.
"Interesting, Dan," by Curtis Gale Weeks, tdaxp, 21 July 2005, http://tdaxp.blogspirit.com/archive/2005/07/20/dreaming-5th-generation-war.html#c177495.
tdaxp pays more attention to music lyrics than most of the blogs in my blogroll. But perhaps others should pay more too. As observers of the world, musicians
- Are creative horizontal thinkers, and help the listener smash the boundaries of intellectual domains
- focus on love, jealousy, lust, and other forms of struggle
- rely heavily on fingerspitzengefuhl -- fingertip feelings -- and so their creative work is relatively unencumbered of the philosophical baggage of more rational thinkers
These thoughts hit me as I listened to Weapon of Choice, surely one of the most frightening songs of recent years.
Take just one verse:
Walk without rhythm, it won't attract the worm
Walk without rhythm, and it won't attract the worm
Walk without rhythm, and it won't attract the worm
if you walk without rhythm, you'll never learn
Hint: it's not about Dune.
Remember how human mind's decision cycle, or the "Observe-Orient-Decide-Act (OODA) Loop," is shown by first that the individual gives a flow of action to the outside world, and the outside world gives the individual a flow of information.
The same basic scheme holds if the individual is a fighter
We can break of the action and information into "friendly" and "hurtful." Hurtful action is when the fighter attacks something in the world, and hurtful information would be when part of the world hurts the fighter.
In SecretWar, or 5GW, the fighter tries to hurt without being hurt -- at all. If the world knows the SecretWarrior exists, she has already lost. 5th Generation War allows very weak fighters to attack, because the world does not know about them. If the world knew about a 5GWarrior she could be eliminated easily.
A 5GW action/information loop would look like:
Or for clarity:
But of course if parts of the world know they are being attacked, they will try to fight back.
In a comment on this blog, Curtis Gale Weeks of Phatic Communion suggested how a fighter could avoid acting on the world in a way that would trigger hurtful information
I was thinking more along the lines of a scenario in which multiple, seemingly unrelated events hurt one nation (or a group of nations) repeatedly, as if "the hand of God" were behind those events: say, one major terrorist act, one major financial crises, one upsurge in bird-flu, one natural disaster, one powergrid failure, and a case of a targeting error in some ongoing conflict (killing many innocents), over the period of 9 or 15 months.
... Successive acts would not necessarily be all of the same nature, thus further blurring the threads that might lead back to a single agent.
And what is the word for actions that seem to be of repeated related events -- of one nature -- to coherent movement?
Rhythm
(rĭTH'em) pronunciation
1. Movement or variation characterized by the regular recurrence or alternation of different quantities or conditions: the rhythm of the tides.
...
7. Procedure or routine characterized by regularly recurring elements, activities, or factors: the rhythm of civilization; the rhythm of the lengthy negotiations.
So to win the SecretWarrior must walk without rhythm to avoid the worm of hurtful information.
To survive, the 5GWarrior must keep her innocence of hurtful knowledge.
To expose the double entendre of Weapon of Choice: the SecretWarrior must not be fucked by the world, ever.
Victory through virginity.
08:45 Posted by Dan tdaxp in Doctrine | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this | Tags: 5gw
Comments
This immediately recalled Frank Herbert's Dune, wherein the way to not attract giant, destructive sandworms as you walk across the desert is to adopt a broken, arrythmic, pretty much random stride and gait. In other words, to sound like background noise. Thanks for the great reads.
Posted by: Paul Kretkowski | Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Paul,
Excellent point.
Analogies are meaningful, and they can help us whether they come from analysis, literature, or music. War is just a form of struggle, and struggle is a central theme of each.
Your summation "in other words, to sound like background noise," keeps echoing through my mind. It made me think of "Easy / Lucky /Free," by Bright Eyes. To excerpt:
"another century spent pointing guns
at anything that moves
sometimes i worry that i've lost the plot
my twitching muscles tease my flippant thoughts
i never really dreamed of heaven much
until we put him in the ground
but it's all i'm doing now
listening for patterns in the sound
of an endless static sea"
The anthem of a man who knows the dangers of SecretWar, but cannot identify the secretwarriors?
I took a look at the short bio available at http://www.paulkretkowski.com. It is a pleasure to have someone of your stature read tdaxp. Thank you.
Posted by: Dan tdaxp | Tuesday, August 02, 2005