Agents of Unity and Separation
In light of all the socio-economical-ecological-geopolitical drama taking place in the recent years, how can the ordinary Citizen play an active role in what appears to be massive social transformation? How can we be active change-makers and participate in the collective process of finding our way through this dense fog of uncertainty and complexity?
In this article I introduce some basic concepts of complex systems science and agent based models to try and shed some light and how the onset of dangerous social complex phenomena like polarisation can be mitigated by committed and engaged citizens like you!
How many people does it take to change the World?
Not that many actually. You only need around 700 000 000 people representing 10% of the world’s population. Seven hundred million people sounds like a lot of people but it surely is not as daunting as 7 billion (a 7 with 9 trailing zeros). For comparison purposes, it is roughly the population of the European continent
As Humanity marches onwards into the first half on the 21st century, our lives, both individually and collectively, are challenged with increasingly complex and super wicked social problems. Starting with climate change, which is, together with nuclear armageddon, the most threatening menace to Mankind, terrorism, looming financial meltdown, major economical and geopolitical power shifts, mass unemployment, civil wars, disintegration of political structures, massive refugee exodus, the list can go on and on.
The curve below will follow us through the rest of this article. I want you to take a good look at it and imprint it in your memory. You will be seeing a lot of these “S” shaped curves in the coming decades.
This curve in particular represents the growth of world population since 1450 with a projection of what it will look like in 2100 (in case you’re wondering, the number is 11 billion!). You can find a lot more interesting world statistics here.
The “S” shaped curve could represent a lot of other different things: rise of CO2 emissions, stock market values, evolution of AI, adoption of a new technology, etc.
The detail to capture in this curve is the exponential growth that started around the 60’s or 70’s and that was responsible for the doubling of the population in a matter of only 30 years.
Even if the growth rate is today much, much lower than it was back in those days (from 2.09% a year in 1968 to 1.09% a year in 2017), it still is positive. This means we’re still adding to the population. If you replace “world population” by “CO2 in the atmosphere” this means that reducing CO2 emissions will continue to add it to the atmosphere and not remove it. This is why I am very skeptical about our chances to curb climate change but this is a whole new article by itself.
Anyhow, this “S” shaped behaviour, which could be described as a linear, slow growth, followed by an imperceptible and often unpredictable (only in hindsight) tipping point and an explosion in growth, is everywhere around us and most importantly, for the stake of this article, also in human social behaviour and belief systems.
This years Nobel Prize in Economics (2017) was awarded to the researcher that basically confirmed what we already suspected: Humans are not rational!; we are Emotional!
Social Complexity
Consider the following parable:
You enlisted yourself for a trekking in a beautiful but treacherous rainforest. You and your group are following an experienced and trustworthy guide that knows the ground like no other. You know there are some paths that will leave you to beautiful pristine and unique waterfalls, while others will lead you to dangerous swamplands filled with alligators, venomous snakes and quicksands. But you feel relatively safe assuming that your guide knows his way.
Slowly, a dense fog starts blanketing the forest and your group. It has become so dense that you can’t even see where you’re treading. “No worries, the guide knows the way”, you are told. You can’t help but feel a bit anxious tough, as the guide is starting to look a bit worried himself. Nervous travel guides and flight attendants are never a good sign.
Now you and your group have reached what looks to be a bifurcation in the path. There’s a 50/50 chance that one of these paths leads to an alligator infested swamp of which there is little escape and you’re guide is fumbling with the map. What do you do? Do you follow him anyway? What if you where the guide: what would you do next? Well, there’s an obvious way out of this: wait for the fog to clear and then make a decision. Pretty straightforward isn’t it? So why on earth is the current generation of politicians insisting on taking us down a path without any clear idea of the road ahead?
We are living in paradoxical times when the same technologies that allow us to feel closer to someone halfway across the globe, are the same technologies that trap us inside a thick layered cognitive bubble out of which it is very hard to come out. And by all, I also mean those who have major political and societal responsibilities; presidents, prime ministers, regional governments leaders, political and sports commentators and scientists (including yours truly). The result of these ever thickening bubbles is an exponential growth (remember the curve) of polarisation between fellow Sapiens: Climate change believers and denialists, left versus right, north versus south, conservatives versus progressives, muslim versus christians, white versus black, man versus woman, to name only a few poles.
Polarisation is a natural consequence of the increasing complexity of the social fabric and is a result of diversity and hyper-connectivity. Polarisation can be a source of creative innovation as has been the case many times throughout our history. The key is in recognising how the two poles A and B are actually two sides of a same coin and to move the discussion up to a level where polarisation doesn’t make sense. Like finding the body that unites your left hand with your right hand.
Polarisation is also the seed of conflict that can escalate to many levels of violence. History is also filled with many of these examples.
So, my thesis here, coming back to the rainforest trek parable, is that our current way of handling polarisation is to choose one of the paths mindlessly and not allowing for the fog to clear and consider safer, more creative ways out. This is very dangerous,as the current socio-economical-ecological-political system is a certified complex system exhibiting the same kind of unexpected exponential cascades as we have seen in the “S” shaped curve above. Never in our history have we needed to be so extremely careful with our personal and collective choices.
We are all agents
Does this all make you feel anxious?
Great! It should as we are facing unprecedented challenges not only because of their scale but mostly because of their interconnectedness: the problems are all linked together. It is difficult to even wrap your head around understanding where to start.
Another fascinating feature of these complex “beasts”, is that they are born out of simplicity. And here’s another (apparent) paradox: although complex social systems behave in ways that are difficult to predict and comprehend, this behaviour is the results of very simple rules of interactions between the so called “agents” of the system and the environment they are operating in. This notion opens up the possibility for computer modelling and simulating of social systems in the hope that we capture what is called the emergent behaviour of the whole.
“-But we are not machines following an algorithm. You’ve said it yourself: we are emotional beings!”
True, I did. But while it is perhaps difficult to model and predict the behaviour of a single human being, it is not so for the aggregate behaviour of hundreds, thousands or even millions of individuals embedded in a social network. And once embedded in a network, our behaviour and beliefs become much more predictable. Just ask the guys doing data analytics for Facebook, Google or trying to meddle with the next election.
The example below is an agent-based model (i.e. a computer model used to predict large scale patterns from the behaviour and interaction of individual agents between themselves and the environment) of 500 individuals in a random (analogue or digital) social network. Each little agent belongs to a specific identity group. You may think of it as those who binge watch Game of Thrones and those who like to watch one episode per week; lets call them purge-watchers. Purge-watchers are very sensitive to spoilers break their links with its binge-watcher friends when they eventually slip the details of the seasons finale over morning coffee. Since you can’t unspoil, this “virus” will spread through the network turning little coloured people into frowny little faces.
See for yourself what happens when a couple of people start spoiling…
Now just replace Game of Throne fans with Catalonians, binge-watchers and purge-watchers with independentists and loyalists and you can almost see Las Rambles in the middle of your screen. This is how wars start and it looks like we haven’t learned a lot in the previous 60 years. Yet another paradox: never in the history of Civilizations has so much knowledge been produced per second, yet we seem to fail to learn from simple history and evolve beyond our biological biases and limitations.
Agents of unity
So how exactly can the 10% make a difference? And more precisely, how can you, who managed to read so far into this article, make a difference.
Everything changes in the above simulation if we add a new type of agents. I like to call them the Healers. Healers are people like you that try to suggest that maybe to wait for the fog to clear is better than taking the risk of walking into the mouth of an alligator. Your role is to be immune to polarisation while keeping an open dialogue between groups. Your role is to have these dialogues with your own friends and peers while nudging in the belief that there is a much richer discussion to have around the overarching field that unites both poles. If you do this long enough we see something dramatic starting to happen.
Our beliefs are not so deeply rooted as you may think. They are mainly a product of our social network and our sensitivity to social influence. Some of us more then others, but, in general, everybody likes to be like their “neighbors”. And in this “game”, there is a tipping point.
Remember the “S” curve? Here’s another one for you. This one shows how many people are needed to shift the belief of a majority of a population only by the power of dialogue and commitment to the message.
The chart shows the percentage of the population that has adopted an alternate viewpoint promoted by the Healers after a given time period. The population starts with the alternative belief in clear minority (less than 15%). By gradually adding our Healers, this breed of highly committed people, we see something magical starting to happen at around 4% to 8 % of the population which is the exponential growth of this alternative belief or behaviour.
The two colors in the graph represent different ways of selecting Healers for this intervention based on their role in the social network.
Now, this doesn’t judge the essence of the belief. This is exactly what political propaganda did in Nazi Germany to shift the majority of the population into accepting World War 2.
If this is so effective, in fact, it is the only social force powerful enough to shift an entire population, maybe we, who believe that an overarching bridge exists, should start using it in favor of a creative unifying agenda.
The ultimate polarisation
It is still a mystery to me why we are so much afraid of the future. I sense that it might have to do with the misconception about the power we have to create it. Our belief in fatalism and the consequent detachment from the responsibility to create it. Could it be that the polarisation between current Self and future Self, our difficulty to engage the worst and the best possible version of ourselves, is the origin of our difficulty in imagining and creating the future from the present? Are we at war with ourselves and with the environment around us?
Having gone and still going myself through a process of inner dialogue between my current Self and my future Self, I firmly believe that this inner polarisation isn’t a sentence.
Let me do my part in nudging you into this belief. The belief that there is always a higher order link between your two inner most distant poles. You just need to search for it. And that, perhaps, is the meaning of Life we all are searching for.
References
1. Xie, J. et al. Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities.
2. Lu, Q., Korniss, G. & Szymanski, B. K. The Naming Game in Social Networks: Community Formation and Consensus Engineering ⋆. J Econ Interact Coord 4, 221–235 (2009).
3. Coburn, C. E. Rethinking Scale: Moving Beyond Numbers to Deep and Lasting Change.
4. Granovetter, M. Threshold Models of Collective Behavior. Am. J. Sociol. 83, 1420–1443 (1978).
5. Fowler, J. H. & Christakis, N. A. Cooperative behavior cascades in human social networks. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 107, 5334–8 (2010).
6. Janssen, M. A. Targeting Individuals to Catalyze Collective Action in Social Networks.
7. Lederach, J. P. The moral imagination : the art and soul of building peace. (Oxford University Press, 2005).
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the support of Humanity United in the development of agent based models of polarisation and John Paul Lederach for all the inspiration and creative dialogue sessions.
