#MeToo, the other butterfly effect
AUGUST 30, 2021 (updated on January 5, 2024)
Table of contents
Last stop in the series on the butterfly effect! In this article, I’m going to explore the parallel between chaos theory and the MeToo movement, mentioned at the beginning of this series. But before I get to the heart of the matter, let’s take a look at the previous episodes. Episode 1: I detailed chaotic systems from the point of view of classical physics. Episode 2: I extended the frame of reference of chaos theory to Nassim Haramein‘s theory of the connected universe. Episode 3: I explored the links between the irreversibility of phenomena, memory and entropy. And finally, episode 4: I highlighted how gravity, entropy and self-organization are entangled in the universe.
Ok, but what is the relationship between the MeToo movement, memory, entropy and more generally physics you may ask? Why, finally, is it possible to apply chaos theory to psychology [1] ? Because any behavior or process, whether physical or psychological, can only appear by following the dynamics of the universe. Otherwise it has no way of manifesting itself.
Memory also plays a role in the MeToo movement, for better or worse, as we shall see. Entropy has its place too. And each voice that rises in concert with the previous ones tends to make the development and anchoring of a new relational between women and men irreversible.
Finally, what is the dynamic that really underlies the butterfly effect, and the MeToo movement in particular? That’s what I propose you discover in this article, which summarizes and illustrates the four previous ones.
A testimony, a liberation
“I owe fact that I was able to speak to all the people who spoke before, in the MeToo cases, and made me change my perspective on what I had experienced.”
ADÈLE HAENEL [2]
Just as the idea of this article was starting to germinate in my mind to illustrate “another butterfly effect”, Adèle Haenel’s testimony came out. I may have followed the MeToo affair, I may have read and heard many testimonies, but I feel like I’ve been hit in the face by this one. It comes to seek me out in my depths, to touch my dark side. And my part of the truth too. Mostly.
It is charged with a certain emotion, authentic, in the service of the message it conveys. In particular, it has the merit of highlighting the evolution of consciousness that occurred in Adèle Haenel’s inner self. An evolution linked on the one hand to the memory of the events lived during her adolescence, and on the other hand to the feedback of the women who testified before her. It is thanks to these two mechanisms that she was able to have another reading of her own emotions, feelings and interpretations.
From this point on, she herself participated in moving the engrams of the feminine and masculine unconscious. She contributed to freeing other feminine words, and possibly other masculine listenings.
From Alyssa Milano’s tweet [3] to Adèle Haenel’s testimony, there was not just one step. But there was a tipping point, a phase change – to put it in physical terms – in the female/male dynamic.
The Yin / Yang dynamics
From maturation to mutation
What could be more symbolic than Yin and Yang to illustrate the dynamic at work between the feminine and masculine energies? I have already discussed the Yin/Yang dynamic in the article Chance or Synchronicity, I will repeat here the main points. Yin and Yang are not opposed but complementary. They evolve in a movement which, driven by an evolution of consciousness, invariably produces a passage from one to the other. The Yin/Yang dynamic thus continuously offers an ever more accomplished experience of each principle. The phases of growth and decline of each energy alternate in such a way that the growth of Yin is simultaneous and proportional to the decline of Yang. And vice versa.
The Yin/Yang dynamic is therefore based on the tendency of each pole to ultimately transform into its “opposite”. The transition from one to the other is first of all a slow maturation, ineluctably followed by a sudden mutation. One may not be aware of the maturation phase, or more precisely of its state of progress. So when the mutation appears, it may seem to come suddenly, if not out of nowhere.
Let us note that the Chinese affix the qualifiers “young” or “old” to Yin and Yang according to the phase in which they are. Thus, the young Yin and young Yang correspond to phases of maturation while the old Yin and old Yang are used for situations on the verge of change.
A question of time
If we are sure that an energy will inevitably be transformed into its complement, the difficulty is to know when this mutation will take place.
Imagine a digital clock that only displays the hours. When you look at it, it is for example 3pm. Without the minute display, you have no way of knowing whether it has just been 3pm or whether it is almost 4pm. If now the “initial conditions” (the time accuracy at the time of studying the system) show “3:01pm”, there is no doubt. And with seconds accuracy, you will know when the display will switch to “3:02pm” etc. The fact that we don’t know when the time change will occur can give a false impression of stability. The seconds and minutes are still ticking away.
In this example, we know what form the system will take although we don’t know when. But in many systems, such as the MeToo movement, we have no information about either form or temporality.
The MeToo dynamics
“How does this happen? What do we all have as a collective responsibility to make this happen?”
ADÈLE HAENEL [4]
Feminine and masculine are in the same boat (Everything is connected)
Appearances can be deceiving. In the MeToo movement, and the feminist movement in general, as in patriarchy, they show us what pits women and men against each other. To see beyond appearances is to understand that the “women’s cause” can only be separated from the men’s in an artificial way. It is also to accept to move the discussion towards the feminine/masculine energy that exists in each woman and each man, as it exists in everything. I invite you to see or review the Feminine, masculine, connected universe slideshow to understand how the feminine and masculine energies unfold and what their relationship is [5].
Like Yin and Yang, these energies are complementary. Becoming aware of this helps to dispassionate the debate. However, it is not a question of eliminating all passion, but simply of putting it in its rightful place. That of a dance between the feminine and the masculine, always on the border between balance and imbalance, order and disorder. Driven by the ineluctable advancement of consciousness in the universe, the feminine learns from the masculine and vice versa, from the quantum scale to the cosmological scale. All levels of organization are connected. Every order exists in dependence on the orders that compose it, and the orders of which it is a part. Or, put another way, the order we observe at our level crosses scales.
As a result, the collective and individual levels communicate and feed off each other. This is explained on the one hand by the fractal nature of the universe and the feedback mechanisms it generates between the different scales. It is also explained by the holographic nature of the universe: as soon as information emerges, it is available at all points in space.
No model of society is definitive (everything is still being determined)
This is how a woman who speaks out makes available a potential for liberation for other women [6]. This potential carries with it the hope that no model of society is definitive. Yet appearances suggest that the patriarchal system has been inert for thousands of years. But the fact that it appears stationary does not mean that it is immutable. No order is established once and for all. Better still, however stationary it may appear, this order, like any other, is in fact in permanent structuring.
Alyssa Milano’s tweet marked a tipping point between the maturation and mutation of the MeToo movement. Far from having come out of nowhere, the outpouring that followed testifies to the highlighting of everything that had long been maturing in the shadows and anonymity. Everything that has accumulated behind the scenes to create a tipping point. And this, both on the global scale of the MeToo movement and on the personal scale of Adèle Haenel.
How could women’s words create a tidal wave to change the established order? A question that echoes this one: how will disturbances on the scale of a butterfly spread to large dimensions like a hurricane? In other words, what are the conditions necessary for the tipping point, the phase change [7] of a system?
Every word counts (the accumulation of energies determines the tipping point)
Let’s say that a butterfly’s wingbeat represents a woman’s testimony. If small causes produce big effects, how can it be that patriarchy has never been threatened until now, despite the women’s voices that have been raised? It is certainly not an ignored testimony that can turn things around. Nor even, in itself, Alyssa Milano’s tweet. On the other hand, such a tweet can be the straw that broke the camel’s back. And that’s what happened. Women who had previously spoken out “in isolation” have found a way to speak out in a coordinated way.
Isolated systems, if they exist at all, cannot self-organize. Self-organization is structured through the exchange of information. This was the role of Alyssa Milano’s tweet. The same result would have been achieved with another tweet or even another trigger, at another time [8]. Whether this particular tweet was there or not makes little difference to the case, provided that there were enough other testimonies suddenly ready to work together, in the creation of a new order. For a woman, depending on whether she testifies or not, will feed two different “orders”: one where she has no voice, the other where her word counts. Men will also feed one or the other, depending on how well they listen.
Again, the unknown is not whether there will be a tipping point, but when will it occur? Let’s keep in mind that a tiny effect that seems isolated and inconsequential to the whole is indeed recorded on the fabric of the universe.
Memory, for better or worse
Indeed, not all small isolated actions are lost. They leave an imprint in the space-memory field – or morphogenetic field – that connects us all. The more thoughts, words and actions are repeated over time, the more influence the energy they generate will have. An influence above all on ourselves, and also on the outside world.
If the memory stores energy in a neutral way, our experience will nevertheless be lived positively or negatively. Thus, it is by the same inner mechanism that Adèle Haenel was silent for a long time – under the influence of a negative experience – and that she one day began to speak, thanks to the impulse of the feminine energy of the MeToo movement. Memory for the worse and for the better.
If enough words are spoken in the same direction, change happens. In terms of physics, this translates into enough energy being put into the system for it to change. Not knowing this can lead to discouragement. Conversely, being aware of it increases perseverance and individual responsibility and creates a positive dynamic for those who doubt. Then another woman can eventually testify in turn.
On the appropriation of conscious space
“The concept of a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a hurricane is only true if you put it in a context of scale. The probability of a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a hurricane is very, very low, if not almost non-existent. But if you have millions of butterflies flapping their wings at the same time, then something is happening.”
NASSIM HARAMEIN [9]
You can stop one butterfly, not a million. You can silence one woman, not millions. The tipping point, the irreversibility of the system, depends on the number of “butterflies” working together. Afterwards, is it order or disorder that will be created, it all depends on the point of view! It may create order for some, but it will sound like disorder for others.
Deterministic chaos thus exposes under the term “sensitivity to initial conditions” that under certain threshold conditions a structure can jump to a disordered state and then to a new order. This is what can happen on the surface. In fact, it simply reaches a bifurcation point that has been fueled by the accumulation of energy quantums until the system tips over.
The repetition of actions eventually brings to consciousness what was previously in the unconscious. Thanks to Alyssa Milano’s tweet, all of a sudden, the previously unknown or ignored testimonies arrived in the conscious space. Suddenly, these testimonies took on a whole new dimension as they manifested before our eyes, on our scale. Suddenly, millions of butterflies flapped their wings at the same time, changing the feminine morphogenetic field. And forcing the male to do the same.
A wing for a wing, a wind for a wind (the principle of resonance)
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that will make the old one obsolete.”
RICHARD BUCKMINSTER FULLER [10]
Where will the MeToo movement take us? No one can predict. Not by looking at the individual trajectories that make up this movement. Nor by speculating on the new direction it might take. The notion of trajectory, in the deterministic sense of the term, has been superseded by the principle of resonance [11].
In other words, trajectories unfold by resonance. Why? Because they are subject to the law of attraction: energies of the same frequency attract each other.
However, if women need to be heard, expressing what is necessary is not enough. We must not stay in that space. We must move our emotions to create a virtuous circle. And if our goal is to move our emotions, it is not defined once and for all. It evolves, because we evolve because of the permanent feedback. We validate, or not, information as it comes in. And many are validated unconsciously because they echo our usual patterns.
On the other hand, what we consider entropy (information that is not useful) can be used by others, in resonance with their own thoughts and beliefs, to create another order from their point of view. If more and more people adhere to this or that order, they gradually anchor the center of gravity of that order of things, increasing the likelihood that it will manifest. If enough people resonate with this center of gravity long enough, the resulting order will manifest itself permanently.
What do we want to create?
Notes & references
[1] A thesis developed by the clinical psychologist Jérémie Vandervoode, Les processus dynamiques – la théorie du chaos en psychologie [Dynamic processes – chaos theory in psychology], in Le Journal des psychologues, n°203, December 2010 – January 2011, p.70 (in French)
[2] HAENEL Adèle, french actress
[3] “If you have been a victim of sexual harassment or assault, write “Me too” in response to this tweet”, October 15, 2017.
[4] HAENEL Adèle, Adèle Haenel explique pourquoi elle sort du silence [Adèle Haenel explains why she is coming out of silence], Médiapart (in French)
[5] See the article Feminine, masculine, connected universe to understand how feminine and masculine energies unfold and what their relationships are. See also the article on the gender principle for a viewpoint more closely related to mental processes.
[6] See also the article on Quantum consciousness.
[7] A phase change is characterized in physics by a sudden change in the state of a system. For example, you can observe a mixture of egg yolk, mustard, vinegar and oil gradually, but irreversibly, change up to a certain point. Beyond that point, the system flips over and changes phase: the “mayonnaise” state occurs.
[8] For more explanations, see the section on Lorenz and the butterfly effect.
[9] HARAMEIN Nassim. (2013, september 25). Nassim Haramein Complete [Podcast]
[10] FULLER Richard Buckminster
[11] See the section devoted to the work of Henri Poincaré in article 1.
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