Trigger Points vs Tipping Points

What's happening?

“Bed of Nets,” Aviva Rahmani, iron bed and drift nets 1991

Some people are arguing over whether or not we are in a civil war in the United States today. In a conversation with someone yesterday, we discussed whether we are already into WWIII: whether the environmental wars begun as backlash to the Green movement, has morphed into an all-out assault from fossil fuel hegemonies, from Russia to Texas to Silicon Valley, extracting life at blood price. I think we are both in a Civil War and fighting WWIII. It just doesn’t look like previous wars.

I remember as a small child, wearing an, “I like Ike,” button. Today, I think Eisenhower was our most prescient President. At his farewell address, when he said, “Beware the military industrial complex,” there would have still been people in the audience who lived through or even fought in the American Civil War. It is worth remembering that the orators of the Confederacy inspired Hitler. The military industrial complex has morphed into the criminal tech. Thiel, trump, Putin, et al are out to dominate the world at all costs. We should beware.

At all costs, for some time, I have hoped I was/ am wrong. I have friends and some family who eagerly tell me I am wrong, with a measure of benign pity for my trump derangement. But I don’t think I am wrong or deranged.

Recently some referred to my trigger point theory, which I developed out of carefully watching how ecological restoration occurs in my Ghost Nets project, as about tipping points. It’s true that I believe trigger point theory can begin to effect serious change but the theory doesn’t turn on a linear change, as a tipping point might. It turns on the idea that as in acupuncture, a system needs to reset to balance and can, if a sufficiently complex set of alignments can affect a cascade from a tiny point of intervention.

Trigger point theory mirrors my understanding of complex adaptive systems and complexity theory. I began developing it in 1990. That was when I was diagnosed with a very severe case of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that left me mostly bedridden for several years. The only thing I found then that helped me was acupuncture, so I researched it as deeply as I could. Those were the same years I was first developing Ghost Nets. During those first difficult years, the only daily task I set myself was to walk the entire site, regardless of weather or stamina, to observe every tiny lesson the land might teach me about healing.

Trigger point theory presumes that resetting a system to a point of balance means unraveling where it has become unmanageable and intervening at exactly the point where order might be reestablished. The Ghost Nets project as ecoart, was inspired by seeing the lost drift nets, called ghostnets that strip-mine ocean life. The idea that there was a time when my fishing people neighbors patiently unraveled the entanglements of summer to prepare for the next fishing season inspired me. The work of untangling depended on finding the one place to begin: the trigger point.

In the horrific events unfolding in Minneapolis and elsewhere at the hands of the current occupiers of the White House, we are watching a contest between two systems. One is unraveling and trying to reestablish control with violent power. The other, despite fatal violence, and betrayals of truth and decency is reasserting basic humanity, kindness, community and democratic values. Apparently, as in any war, this will be a fight to the death.

In acupuncture, when a system is reset, the lines of energy simply realign. When I went through cancer treatments about a decade ago, I carefully studied how cytokines work in the system to provide resilience to intrusive threats. They work much as Chinese medicine views systemic disruptions and resets. A part of the system that must rely on coordination for health goes haywire.

A nation has a legitimate right to a military to defend itself from assault. Military turned against its own nation is an abomination. Industry and technologies are wonderful things. A military and technology complex turned into instruments of brutal repression and deceit is criminality. Violence purely for the sake of power and control in subjugating others cannot legitimated. Minneapolis may have activated the trigger point. Whether it will be the tipping point, we shall see.