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John Carter's avatar

Left unstated is just what symbol should be chosen for the logocracy. The rigid hierarchy and scale-free sameness of the Sierpinski gasket certainly seems appropriate for pathocracy, which is incapable of producing anything new - to the contrary, its pitiless order is a form of death, or at any rate anti-life.

I'd suggest the Mandelbrot set to be the appropriate symbol of logocracy. It never repeats itself: no matter how deep into it one goes, one will never find precisely the same pattern. This seems more in keeping with the infinite possibilities of a logocracy, which does not seek to impose, but rather to facilitate an unfolding. Further, it is generated not by iteration of a simple pattern that repeats at all scales, but by a function that either converges to a finite quantity or diverges to infinity: inside the boundaries of the set the function is trapped, outside it is free, and within the set it is indeterminate. That seems to mirror the gnostic tension between matter and spirit, with humanity and the world at the interface of the two.

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Charles Clemens's avatar

What a long strange trip that was! You went from Plato to the Cathars, did a quick spin on the Sierpinski Triangle and ended up in Joe Biden's America. That being said, my favorite part was the link to "Somethin' ain't right". I bow to your analysis and computer skills. That essay had more turns than the Nurburgring.

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