Tuesday, November 4, 2014

multiplicity disadvantaged

Care for the (six) self-assembled layers of organization in our social systems (that namely look in/out from our skin, family & culture) is an obligation that those of us who populate these systems have not evolved to support. Instead, these social systems have organized themselves so as to accomodate the traits from simpler social systems (e.g. with five or fewer layers) for which we are adapted to care.

In this sense, all of us as individuals are (niche-network task-layer) multiplicity-disadvantaged. However our actions don't have to be.

The bad news is that electronic communications can in today's information age hook into naturally-evolved traits (like xenophobia, and our ability to react first then think) so as to redirect our attention toward pursuits that are not informed to the interest of subsystem-correlations on all six layers of social-organization. Humor directed toward cartoonification of these "multiplicity-disadvantaged" behaviors is a powerful weapon that, in my view, is so far quite under-utilized in pointing out the "unlayered ignorance" of actions e.g. that wantonly destroy cultures, break up families, and disrupt or even terminate the lives of individuals.

Does it make you better if you push others around and/or tear things down e.g. like a population's immunity to polio? Quite the contrary, you have to be deserving of ridicule in order to do such stuff.

Laughter is a powerful (and similarly evolved) weapon that can help us put such behaviors into context, for ourselves as well as for future generations. In that spirit, comedians unite!