The problem with vertical community is that human beings, at heart, will seek to aggrandize and aggregate their worst selves, and race to the moral, intellectual, and social bottom in groups.
We don't yearn to be thrown together with people who don't agree with us. We yearn to be with others like ourselves.
The problem with vertical community is that human beings, at heart, will seek to aggrandize and aggregate their worst selves, and race to the moral, intellectual, and social bottom in groups.
We don't yearn to be thrown together with people who don't agree with us. We yearn to be with others like ourselves.
The strength of diversity in a horizontal community is the "wisdom of crowds" phenomenon-- that in many matters the aggregate of individual perceptions can neutralize out errors and outliers. The economic need to eat and survive also constrain how far we can go down the death road to uniformity and extinction.
We invented the internet and it happens to be an almost perfect vehicle to unleash our worst inclinations and ambitions. If we don't break the verticalization of community, we will destroy ourselves. And since we also have the technology to destroy not only our human world but the very biosphere itself -- and there seems nothing in view to stop the momentum toward disaster It may be -- we are using our skills, technology, and energy to rush over the precipice. Very likely it's too late to stop even if we choose.
Fascism is about the insane dream of making all the horizontal communities into a single vertical community. When every vertical community seeks to subjugate the others, we have civil war. When vertical communities seek not only to subjugate but to annihilate the others, we have holocausts and the death of civilization. Stage one of the pathology of civilization death.
The problem with vertical community is that human beings, at heart, will seek to aggrandize and aggregate their worst selves, and race to the moral, intellectual, and social bottom in groups.
We don't yearn to be thrown together with people who don't agree with us. We yearn to be with others like ourselves.
The strength of diversity in a horizontal community is the "wisdom of crowds" phenomenon-- that in many matters the aggregate of individual perceptions can neutralize out errors and outliers. The economic need to eat and survive also constrain how far we can go down the death road to uniformity and extinction.
We invented the internet and it happens to be an almost perfect vehicle to unleash our worst inclinations and ambitions. If we don't break the verticalization of community, we will destroy ourselves. And since we also have the technology to destroy not only our human world but the very biosphere itself -- and there seems nothing in view to stop the momentum toward disaster It may be -- we are using our skills, technology, and energy to rush over the precipice. Very likely it's too late to stop even if we choose.
Fascism is about the insane dream of making all the horizontal communities into a single vertical community. When every vertical community seeks to subjugate the others, we have civil war. When vertical communities seek not only to subjugate but to annihilate the others, we have holocausts and the death of civilization. Stage one of the pathology of civilization death.
I think we're pretty near full blown stage 1.