Humergence®

Globalization and Cultural Shifting

The Mathematical Structure of Terrorism from PhysOrg.com  makes reference to a paper titled Universal patterns underlying ongoing wars and terrorism. From the paper's abstract:

"We report a remarkable universality in the patterns of violence arising in three high-profile ongoing wars, and in global terrorism. Our results suggest that these quite different conflict arenas currently feature a common type of enemy, i.e. the various insurgent forces are beginning to operate in a similar way regardless of their underlying ideologies, motivations and the terrain in which they operate. We provide a microscopic theory to explain our main observations. This theory treats the insurgent force as a generic, self-organizing system which is dynamically evolving through the continual coalescence and fragmentation of its constituent groups."

 

Collective Action vs. Collectivism

The P2P Foundation Blog has an excellent blog posting by Michel Bauwens on Jaron Lanier's new essay for Edge. 

The basic ideas of Lanier's essay are (quoted from CommunityWiki):

• There is a resurgance of the idea that the collective is all-wise, and that this is bad.

• There is an attempt to erase the individual, and this is dumb.
• AI is dumb. The Internet is dumb. Only people are smart.
  

The P2P foundation blog posting by bauwens borrows from his own P2P Manifesto, which looks at human collective action through the lens of Clare W Graves's theory of human nature. Clare W. Graves's theory shows that the fundamental nature of communist "collectivism" is different from the collective action of people voluntarily cooperating, as discussed by author Howard Rheingold here.

I also talk about this in the discussion section of this CommunityWiki page. I talk about how we are lacking a general "literacy of human nature", and how I believe that this lack of understanding is what is driving people to place labels where they do not belong. The reasons "why" people voluntarily collaborate are different than the reasons "why" people go along with state-imposed "collectivism" rules.