Back in the day, when I was more under the late Ed Applewhite's tutelage, or lets say when I regarded him as a key mentor (who wouldn't?), which I still do, he pointed me towards E.O. Wilson's writings, wondering what my assessment was. He was curious as he already knew I'd be a torch bearer for Synergetics, the thing he'd worked on all those years, with his mentor Dr. Fuller.
Fast forward and I'm still circling entomology, the study of insects, partly in my study of "hive minds" in the sense of trans-individual, by which I mean social and perhaps institutional. I was introduced to the vocabulary of sociology pretty early, in 8th grade, by Fred Craden, our Sociology teacher at the Overseas School of Rome (OSR), as it was then called (AOSR today).
I'm currently thinking Applewhite would've seen why I'm fan of David Graeber, who came along later, and who was involved in Occupy, as I was, though on the opposite coast.
Portland's Occupy was special because of how the Bonus Army began its campaign (there in Portland, in that very city square) that ended up in the infamous Hooverville, the vet encampment outside the White House. We've seen this pattern repeat too. Smedley Butler was a witness to MacArthur's thuggish vanquishing of the veterans' village, on Hoover's instructions.
Through my study of the Active Inference corpus, I've also re-encountered Applewhite's own writings about ants in his Paradise Mislaid. He was engaged in a polymathic, cross-disciplinary study around the perennial "what is life really?" question. What are its characteristics? Does it have an essence?
He'd cross paths with biologists much as he'd crossed paths with crystallographers in connection with his work on Synergetics and Synergetics 2 (both Macmillan) plus he'd authored the Synergetics Dictionary (Garland Press). E.O. Wilson is in PM's index, right before Wittgenstein.
