Disparity

The potential for an immeasurably complex future is contained within the past. Those who work with oil indirectly acknowledge this. Our biology (and to some extent, imagination) seems to play some role in compressing this, connecting the dots in vast fields of chaos into some order, a structure built on the fundamental principles of the universe, whose very existence on these terms affirms itself. Stability through time, however, within the chaotic environments which result from the myriad of different directions life take - and more recently, individual minds - is a far more difficult problem. An organism whose existence would otherwise be self affirming though time may be forced, if a predator were to be introduced into the environment, to develop on a fundamental genetic level strategies in order to affirm itself in that environment. The predator acts as a genetic attractor of a certain polarity, if you like, forcing the organism to develop based on the environment it asserts - the real issue here for the organism is one of time, forcing it, assuming a simple environment, from a relatively inert internal feedback mechanism (think reproduction, or dreaming) into a process which compresses space and time into structures which, while limiting, allow the organism to survive in tandem with its predator.

This process can be extended to more abstract notions of 'self' - identity playing the role of the organism. Social identity and the biological structure which carries it are closely tied, essentially a requirement to survive in our current environment. Though this connection is largely imaginary, simple weight of belief validates and strengthens this connection. In an environment where identity attacks identity, there are several strategies - one being simply a loose connection with the imaginary interpretation of self. This is difficult to achieve if the majority of your environment is invested in this imaginary interpretation. Another is to attack or defend in an 'attractive' manner - i.e. one which fools, or otherwise, the majority of those observing into believing the validity of the imagined interpretation, usually by entangling the opposing identity with a negative concept, possible coupled with 'humour' as the attack vector and/or by using ones own positively interpreted position as leverage. Of course, those who are well versed in or have dedicated a great majority of their time to this landscape will attempt to convince others of its validity as a means of their identities survival - to secure their place in an imagined hierarchy, for example.