Not Sheep, but human societies, have done similar things in our
collective past.
David Graeber's book, the Origin of Everything, details the
multiplicity of organizational and governmental forms and poses the
question of how did we get stuck in the one we have now.
davew
It does seem not unlike technological lockin... Their have been modes
of mutual lockin over and over in history it seems... and generally
takes (took) an external perturbation to break the pattern. Some of us
imagined/hoped that the fall of the Soviet Union would lead to a
significantly new global dynamic with a modest "peace dividend". And
the formalization/normalization European national-relations that lead to
the EU was another phase transition. The results were limited (modulo
Ukraine/Brexit/GreekAusterity/???).
I think Dave is (West, Weingrow and Graeber, all) is suggesting
something much more significant (even) than things like the shift from
Czarist Russia to the Leninist Communist early Soviet Union.
Harari's _Sapiens_ describes a time before the age of (European)
Exploration when there were a handful of separate Universes-of-Culture
with presumably *NO* mutual contact (Afro-Eurasia, MesoAmerica, Andean
South America, Australia, Pacifica) on the scale of centuries if not
millenia. Meanwhile, there were myriad foraging/subsistence
subcultures aware of and constrained by but not *driven* by these
mega-cultures who were able to form up their own variations based on
myriad factors.
It seems to me that our current lock-in is severely limited by the
global transportation, communication (and therefore trade/military, etc)
technological reality.
Those of us who might openly idealize (DaveW, GaryS, Self, ...) a rural
semi-self-sufficient self-governing lifestyle are (should be) confronted
with the lack of resource available for more than a tiny fraction of the
current 8billion to live that way. One of Harari's points about the
"dawn of agriculture" is that the result was *not* an improved
nutrition/security profile for any individual (just the opposite), but
rather a denser (human) carrying capacity of a landscape. It appears we
have gone past that point everywhere but the most remote regions. Even
the hinterlands of NM, UT, and Ecuador where the three of us implicated
by this paragraph live are likely well past being able to support a
subsistence (much less foraging) lifestyle for even a fraction of those
already parked here? The scale of apocalypse required to reduce
population to such a level is unthinkable by most measures... not to
mention all the damn Zombies wandering around for decades until their
bodies fully decompose?
On Mon, Nov 21, 2022, at 7:26 AM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
From hackernews
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-022-01769-8
corrected link from comments to
"Sheep flocks alternate their leader and achieve collective intelligence"
The secret sauce of american democracy.
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