In a networked world, you can't fully anticipate the effect of your actions. Connections between people, places, and things, bound by common a propagative or communicative medium, cause small changes to have amplified consequences. So these actions matter.
Interdependence and interlocking systems, bourne by the informatic blood flowing in the veins of digital media, carrying our attention as its metabolites; COVID-19 was not an infection of just the body, but also the mind, the world. It created economic downturn and political polarization. It sped up the production of knowledge and lab integration, while simultaneously causing corruption and festering in our epistemic standards of public discourse. In a complex world, no large-scale change escapes becoming a kind of epidemiology. A single virus can change the fate of nations. And so perhaps it can be said that a single cough, a single unwashed handshake, from a single patient zero complicitly chose our fate.
Nonetheless. This edge cuts both ways.
"Think local, act global." There are games like the Tragedy of the Commons that are only played because all the actors play out helplessness because they believe their local actions make no difference to the trend. Their logic is reflexive and knotted. "Someone else would do it anyway." And so everyone else does. "Someone else will do it for me." And so no one does anything at all.
We need to play a new game. This game will succeed not because the rules are different, or oppressive, but because it understands the truth. "Our world is ending, why try to be good?" Because this is a complex world. You don't know whether or not you are helpless. You don't know whether your act of kindness will have unintended consequences. But you do know that true kindness does no harm. You do know that some kindness will do some good.
The "Butterfly Effect" says many things. Among them, it states that no change of a part can occur without a change in the whole. "Small changes have big consequences" is often dramatized as a cautionary tale in movies as they rate the status quo as something to perserve. It seems obvious to me that our global status quo is something to be improved. Does the butterfly effect not still stand? Then are our actions not still able to cascade and propagate, with our kindnesses "paid forward"?
So this double-edged sword was forged by Damocles. It hangs over our head at every moment, reminding us of our responsibility to the world and to others, to not let our freedom make us complicit. It is suspended by a web much thicker than a hair, but just as fragile. It suggests disaster is imminent as one marches forward to enact a greater good.
Where does this analogy end? By living in a complex world, our good can amplify beyond our evil. Chesed - choose love, as your actions matter in ways you don't expect. And let that butterfly land on another's hand, and let that next man pay it forward.
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Topological Synchronization of Chaotic Systems
- Was this post poetic? Yes. Yet sound. Why? Another story for another time. The prologue: synchronization of a total system starts most effectively in its sparsest regions. In spaces where there is little activity, the few can control the many. Your world is local, too.