Mike Oliker wrote: > The Genius of James Madison was to see that a large country with many > factions would be freer from factionalism that a small country would be. Seems to me what matters is the number of truly independent factions an individual can be affiliated. A company like Nokia, for example, has a fundamental influence on Finland while only a small fraction in the country have a share in the company. Throughout the world, Microsoft tells hardware suppliers what and when to do it. WalMart can provide `protection' for a supplier at a scale a mere mafia goon couldn't even imagine. A large country has larger organizations that yield more leverage on their government. The individual, vastly overshadowed by her true representatives in government, can thus put aside her posited evolutionary drive to create diversity, and either attempt to rise through the ranks at such a company, move between companies without conviction, or make new viable companies (where viability is strongly correlated to the status quo which is also strongly autocorrelated).
Getting back to Phil's original question about why people don't understand or listen to one another: In the evolutionary view, it's posited that individuals acted independently because there was some survival benefit from the diversity. Today the path of least resistance seems to be to suppress that. To be a middle class baby maker in Japan or the United States or Europe, you're better of to conform to corporate requirements. I could see there is some possibility of having the state of China come eat up your corporation, but come on, how many middle class individuals will act with any ferocity in response to an abstract threat like that? I emphasize the individual here because we are ultimately taking about reproductive fitness. People do communicate a great deal. Mobile phones are a huge business and seem to be in constant use. I'd argue that, if anything, there is too much communication and not enough said. So those of us that still have the posited evolutionary drive toward diversity like to try to *make* some by picking each other apart. To illustrate what seems to be the same on first glance is different! Whew! ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
