War, wealth and political insecurity reproduce the problems they ostensibly intend to resolve, sustaining destructive relationships whose continuity subsequently appears necessary.
Categories
War, Wealth and Wickedness
Tag: collective behaviour
Language is more than a means of exchanging information. Beneath meaning and communication lie physical dynamics of rhythm, resonance and persistence that shape collective behaviour, social reality and the patterns through which we understand the world.
Captain Fractal examines how political identities, media algorithms and institutional resistance to change reproduce conflict and instability.
From social media and human psychology to Gaia and cosmic self-regulation, an exploration of identity, feedback, emergence and the illusion of control.
The paradox is how to preserve a planetary civilisation’s capacity for emergent self-regulation without irreversibly surrendering it to the political, economic and technological artefacts, entities and systems established to manage and control it.
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Yes, We’re All Individuals
Why institutions, political movements and intellectual communities reproduce the same patterns of identity, conformity and exclusion while insisting on their differences.
A protest becomes something different when separate grievances begin moving at the same time. France offers a glimpse of how synchronisation amplifies communicative affect.
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Populism Without a Populist
Populism may not need to be manufactured. An overwhelmed communication system already rewards simplification, antagonism and recurrence, while those best placed to change it profit from the resulting volatility.
Fascism does not begin with a dictator. It takes shape through recurrent patterns of threat, identity and authority, until a leader can occupy the position those patterns have made available.
A civilisation builds systems to solve its problems, then discovers that the systems have become the problems, while its dependence upon them has made their continuity deeply problematic.
At the limit lies bullshit: language sufficiently detached from external constraint that its capacity to provoke another cycle of response becomes more important than what it describes.
The probable is a proper subset of the possible. Old habits die hard because viable communication preferentially reproduces patterns that make themselves more likely to recur.
