Time To Re-Weave The Fabric of Society

Nick Booth
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read

Descriptions of systems seem to be made up a range of things but often they focus on two: — institutions and the flow of people and activity between them.

They can be more like a care pathway than a carefully paved way to see things differently.

One of the hard parts can be how to picture society in the system. Should it be a blob somewhere? Is it the link in between, is it the whole or does it lie outside the whole?

Often this pictures society as being either nebulous, intangible or both. At best the by-product of concrete things.

Is blob enough?

Is that good enough? I think it’s important to think of society as a thing in it’s own right. A thing important enough in any system to warrant working on it directly.

I was listening to Desert Island Discs last week with Professor Carlo Rovelli and a penny dropped…

(massive over simplification alert)

In Loop Quantum Gravity Theory space and time are not simply an environment in which things happen — like a place in which stars are born and die — they are a thing in their own right.

Spacetime is a substance. It has qualities, it is made of some stuff.

If we think of the stars and the planets sitting on this stuff we have images like this

Lets switch what spacetime is, call it society.

Flexy world…

The star is a big thing — perhaps a government policy or a large national institution. The planet is a smaller thing — a charity, or maybe a community group — perhaps, when it’s very small, a family or an individual. They sit on a flexible thing called society.

The bigger the object sitting on the fabric of society the more it influences and distorts that fabric. The more it inclines things to operate in it’s orbit or way of working.

Is there anything we can do to influence this?

Yes. We can work on the fabric of society itself.

If we strengthen the ties and tighten the weave then the fabric sags less. The gravitational pull of the different institutions changes, the gradient is shallower and the larger ones don’t have quite the same clout to capture the smaller ones.

At Last, A thing…

More importantly we have understood that society itself is a thing, just as spacetime is a thing. Other things exist in relationship to it, not simply as an element of it.

So if you want to change the way a system works one thing you can now do is work on the fabric of society itself: build relationships, create trust, weave new patterns.

And to do all this of course takes resources, effort, skill, money.

Oh and space and time.

Nick Booth

Written by

Working at community/govt level to grow civic conversation through www.podnosh.com @socmediasurgery www.impactassessmentapp.com .

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