Thursday, February 16, 2012

race to the bottom

One-celled organisms will eventually outlast fragile metazoans on this planet, as our sun moves toward it's "cool red-giant" phase. Meanwhile the delicate layers of social structure in communities of social-metazoans (like us) may be dismantled as well. Put another way, border-checkpoints between states and even cities may be in our long-term future as well as in our past.

However there's no need to let new-found electronic communications catalyze a race-to-the-bottom, via its ability to echo neolithic-ideas that are naturally attractive to humans in tough times. Runaway-cartoonification (e.g. bad-mouthing) of others is one of those idea-patterns whose seductiveness we discovered when part of our house was being used by a business, with the incidental consequence that patterns of employee-behavior unperturbed by the observation-process itself were impossible to miss.

Put simply, humans are not always by nature constructive. The ability of ideas to quickly spread themselves across the globe means that a close look at the idea-types that we echo may be quite important in the years ahead.  In this context what idea-types would you put on a list of "likely constructive", and what types on list of "possibly de-constructive"?

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