The Zeonism of @mitigatedchaos

I feel that I must include the following for completeness. It’s not Gundam canon, but tumblr user @mitigatedchaos writes interesting things, and this is relevant to Zeonism.

First, read this series of posts. If you are confused, read the follow-up partial explanation post, delving into one part of the setting.

Appeal the ban to Steam on the grounds that “the right of space colonies to political self-determination” is your “sincerely-held religious belief.” If there is ANY gamer in your family tree, you will be instantly un-banned as this is constitutionally-protected as ruled by Unicorn6888 vs Activision.

The zeal that burns in each of our hearts for the colonies’ cause (what you would call the “Zeon”) is a protected form of religious expression, not least out of justice for the visionary Mr. Musk who was taken from us before his time.

Even buried in political satire, Zeonism is depicted as a religion of liberation for Spacenoids.

At least, that’s what I thought at first. I mentioned such to Mitigated Chaos, and they replied thusly:

My general view is that Zeonism is simultaneously prescriptive (a body of thought based on the writings of Zeon Deikun) and descriptive (a set of actions undertaken by a group of people, including Zeon Deikun, the Zabi family, and Char). Because “Zeonism” embodies multiple interrelated things, ‘Sieg Zeon’ has multiple simultaneous meanings, but not no meaning.

Under multi-level recurrent ecology, the world is viewed as existing in layers of increasing abstraction. Patterns emerge at the base level (replication, division, acquisition of resources, etc) of molecules, and then may reappear at greater levels of abstraction (often though not necessarily also more complex) such as the cell or multicellular organism.

“Zeon” is a nation, and thus like many things, a phenomenon which exists across multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously. It is,

• A people (and their associated biology, particularly noting the existence of newtypes)
• A place (the various space colonies and their environment)
• A memetic wave or ideology which synchronizes the actions of individuals and harmonizes their actions towards a specific direction (including rebellion against the ruling Earth Federation)
• An information environment within which that wave spreads
• A hierarchy and set of institutions guided by that ideology within that information environment which shape the actions of those people in that place
• A set of specific technologies which enable all of the above, including the eventual invasion of Earth with giant robots from space
• A sequence of events which enable all of this to happen

Cultivation of national ecology is not a form of transcendence nor in itself a moral action, but can be directed towards multiple ends, some of which are better or more moral than others. Further, the different layers of abstraction have different qualities, not just different quantities - as reasoning beings humans are able to make agreements or make changes to the world which are effectively unreachable to, say, iguanas. (Thus newtypes can be viewed from a certain perspective as being at a ‘higher level of evolution,’ due to their ability to reach a new level of communication, but of course that primarily makes sense as ‘figurative’ evolution, rather than literal.)

In another art project, a countryball describes splitting another countryball in two as “simple, if you understand the particle-wave duality of nationhood,” and this is essentially the joke. A nation is both a physical thing or group of people (“particles”) and a phenomenon (“waves”). In Polandball countries are generally represented as unified wholes; the act of splitting a country in two thus only seems sensible if you realize they are not (e.g. composed of “subnational particles better known as hominids”). But of course even if you do know this it isn’t actually simple at all, and a countryball treating it as such is a distortion, similar to when Germanyball morphs into the Reichtangle.