Why we're all mostly out of the loop

From early childhood we’ve all experienced consternation with being shut out of the conversation, say defining circles of friends, that would have been very important to us to feel part of. There are even exclusive story loops within families, between mom and the kids separate from between dad and the kids, for example. Sometimes it’s very funny, and sometimes very sad, what remains hidden from the adjacent conversation. Stories that travel in small circles, defining exclusive communities, are actually everywhere, from determining whether we “get the memo” in the office, are “clued in” on what’s hot in fashion or music or ideas, and even whether we share in the “terrible truth” about the other political party, religion, social movement, nationality or race. Personal and cultural circles are not fixed, of course, but growing and changing their inside stories and how they circulate all the time. Because this is how shared ideas normally develop, within loops, there’s a lot of confusion simply because everyone is left out of most them!

It’s quite fortunate that nature is not nearly as confused by this arrangement as people are. Nature is organized in much the same way, as local behavioral loops that develop and play out in a common environment. Networks of behavioral loops that grow from small beginnings are what ecosystems are, or volcanic eruptions, weather systems or electric sparks, not to mention living organisms. It’s what families, businesses, economies and neighborhoods are too. One thing that all the objects of the world we care about have in common is a loose structure of closed behavioral loops that grew from small beginnings. Nature runs on them like local software. We’re not talking particularly about things having a physical inside and out here, but a behavioral one, like open markets where connections can be made on an anytime/anywhere basis. The parts of two different ‘behavior loops’ can overlap and still remain quite separate, and often do.

Why loops? Well, using a sort of Darwinian explanation, it’s because only loops have the possibility of growth, and only those loops that grow ever get noticed. Sun, soil and rain are absolutely critical to a plant, all being factors that can tip the cascade of events or not, but it's the seed, the network of loops, that grows.

So why are we all so out of the loop? We’re surrounded by them. The unseen structures of nature are hidden inside them. And we’re all just barely starting to figure it out.

8/28 …oh, yea, and… fourthly, their real chains of connection are mostly untraceable and run backward. They’re open chains of opportunity not closed chains of necessity. That screws up most of human reasoning. The behavior loops of nature work like bucket brigades where each person in the chain picks up a bucket from wherever they find it and puts it down where anyone else might pick it up. You’d think this wouldn’t work… and you’d be right, it wouldn’t work to execute any plan. Nature, fortunately, isn’t following a ‘plan’, and that’s why everything gets to follow its own, and interactions are so resilient and flexible! A little more explanation might be in order, but may not be much help for understanding why complex natural systems work ‘oddly’ in that way. Human thinking is more comforted by rules for what is necessary. Well, there are some rules for natural systems (all systems come from growth & what grows is their loops) , but you need to start where you always start, with basic unguarded observation, hoping something soaks in.

A really quick study..

The curve of murder rates in New York State, from the 1960 to 2004 shows the great US crime wave, a little more dramatic in New York than elsewhere. Notice the shape of the sudden decline at the end. It's an exponential decay curve, (collapse to fading away) that continues. We knew the abrupt decline of the crime rates was mysterious. This is why. Practically the only thing that could explain sudden collapse and decay of crime rates is if part of the crime culture was a living thing, and it died. Could that be? Yes, sure, think of the crimewave as representing a short lived culture, like a bigger and more complicated than usual fad. It could die for the same reason the Soviet Union collapsed and died, loosing it's appeal to those involved. With the crime wave I think it may have been the crack cocaine that finally did it. By the 90’s the ghetto anger of the 60's was no longer fresh, there were limited but real gains in civil rights and economic opportunity to replace it, and crack was really messing up the drug lords' lives, all combining to make the criminal lifestyle stop being cool.

To my surprise after posting the above (slightly edited now) I discovered the NY Times had an excellent Week In Review piece on the very subject, “Where Killers are Out of Style”. And I had a chance to discuss it at length with my criminologist friend John. He doesn’t see cohesive self-organizing natural systems behind everything that happens the way I do, but did admit that there was also an unexplained resurgence of New York City as a whole, highlighted by the rejuvenation of Times Square and the coming high tech. boom, at about the same time.

I don’t think any of these kinds of things are run from the mayor’s office, as Guiliani claimed over and over. Yes, the mayor did add police and got them back in the neighborhoods and to tend to quality of life crimes etc. That’s good, but it was in concert with a wave of good things happening, and crime didn’t decline proportionately, but collapsed, and nationwide, catching absolutely everybody off guard! Others have pointed to a statistical correlation between the states with the highest increases in abortion rates in the 70's and declines in crime in the 90's, but you can't make a causal connection with that. It just says that both things tended to happen in the communities where the 60's crime wave hit the hardest in the first place. Well, there's no surprise about that! The abortion correlation doesn't explain what the original eruption and its sudden resolution were about in the slightest.

I think most social trends display classic group behavior, swells and flows of culture that we're all part of, but that no one clearly understands or controls. I see them as natural open system events like those of ecologies, or like storms and weather. They are much better treated as independently evolving living things in their own right. It definitely adds to the intrigue that they’re made from us and we can be quite unaware of them, they act dynamically as wholes and have no fixed parts or apparent structures, and have no spokesperson.

It's hard to read culture without bias of course. I don't have it documented, but in all the articles I've read about this, including this one, I don't think I've read any mention of the observations on what happened from those most involved. That's very odd. Someone surely must have noticed something being different, with the crime rate dropping by about 2/3! It would be good to find a way to ask.

The bigger big con

Personal lives can always be seen as complicated, or not, depending on our moods if nothing else, so perception isn't necessarily a good gage.   Most of us, though, notice the continual change in what we deal with in our work, personal & public lives.   Decade after decade, life keeps getting much more complicated.   

 

It's the tell-tale sign of a truly stupendous oversight.    Continual economic growth is achieved by creating exponentially more complicated tasks, forever.    It's the kind of thing that could lead to either real disappointment in what we're building, or real tragedy when it fails.   The hope of limitlessly growing wealth, like the promise of a free cure for every ill, is a remarkably easy sell.    What was it Barnum said...?     Maybe we should put our hopes for mankind in something else.

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