The World's First UCaPP Government

The United States may have elected the first Internet President - one who seems to truly understand the messages of the UCaPP* world. Canada, on the other hand, is about to form the very first UCaPP government in the world - one that appears to be problematic when viewed from a BAH perspective, but very much in tune with a Valence Theory reading.

If one considers this situation with a fogey mind, the proposed coalition government between the Liberals and NDP, with the support of the Bloc Québécois, appears to be an act of political opportunism, with the objective being the acquisition of legitimated power (i.e., the Prime Ministership and Cabinet posts) for the sake of power. Particularly for those who support our now hapless Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, the game has always been about acquiring power, and wielding paternalistic influence to create a right-wing, reactionary, neo-liberal government.

Sorry... my political biases are showing.

But those who consider the world from today's perspective - with the eyes of the 21st century, rather than the 19th - a collaboration among three political parties that have each put aside their purposeful objectives and carefully considered each other's contexts, is entirely consistent with the dominant effects of a UCaPP world. Valence Theory can explain the emergent government-in-waiting through the five valence relationships that are now strengthening and binding what otherwise might look like strange bedfellows. They are indeed strange, but strange in the vocabulary of complexity theory (the precise mathematical definition, from Wikipedia):

An attractor is a set to which a dynamical system evolves after a long enough time. That is, points that get close enough to the attractor remain close even if slightly disturbed. ... An attractor is informally described as strange if it has non-integer dimension or if the dynamics on it are chaotic.

It does sound a bit like our political situation, doesn't it?

Seriously, though, collaboration is the name of the game in a UCaPP world, and creates the most effective organizations that are, in fact, the most democratically representative. With the small plurality that he achieved, Stephen Harper cannot lay claim to a unitary mandate from the people. His pseudo-moral position that, having lost the confidence of the House, a coalition is somehow undemocratic, rings hollow - the last gasps of a desperate man who can no longer get what he wants through bullying and political cynicism, justifying his actions on deceitful technicalities.

I agree with the Conservative talking points on one issue: now is the time to put Canada and ALL Canadians first, ahead of political power games. Mr. Harper: Jim Flaherty's Fiscal Update was a political power game. Proroguing Parliament is a political power game. Organizing anti-coalition rallies is a political power game. Calling for another general election is a political power game. It is time to put Canada first, accept the inevitable non-confidence vote quickly, and step down.

Like George W Bush set the stage for, and ushered in the world's first UCaPP President, you will have the historical fame for ushering in the world's first UCaPP government. And that, indeed, puts Canada first.

*A note on acronyms: BAH is Bureaucratic, Administratively controlled, and Hierarchical, which characterizes most organizations to a greater or lesser degree. I argue that BAH structures and their consequential methods of management became dominant in the Industrial Age, and remain to this day, albeit gussied up with names like "best practices" and "knowledge management."

UCaPP abbreviates the concept of being Ubiquitously Connected and Pervasively Proximate, which is the way that I characterize the massively interconnected world in which we live. Because we are, or soon will be, connected to everyone and all available information (ubiquitous connectivity) we feel the effects of being next to, or proximate to everyone and all available information (pervasive proximity). This condition changes one's direct experience of the world relative to those of us born before the 1990s (approximately), especially for those who are born directly into that experience.


[Technorati tags: stephen harper | parliament | coalition]