Critical Mass: A Wake Up Call
It's a shame that most people will not read the book Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another by Philip Ball. In essence it's an antidote to media hype and academic air-spinning, a physics-based approach to social science capable of emancipating the individual and seeing with our eyes wide open.
The desire to simplify for the sake of analysis - to categorize, if you will - explains to a large extent why the human race has survived. Yet too often, our categorization contradicts the essence of how things are.
For example, our binary approach to science (empirical or rational); our metaphysical dichotomies (Darwinism or God); and friction-less utopian assumptions (economics), still bitterly divide us.
In truth, we are both made and simultaneously make ourselves. We are free to be who we are while, at the same time, are subject to inexorable laws.
Choice and certainty are both part of the same package.
Even if things are going to end up in a foreseen manner (e.g., death, taxes), we can't be sure just where along the path we are at any given moment. Just as snowflakes conform to mathematical laws, so too humans, each unique as individuals but, as a general population, often predictable.
In this way, even the logic of game theory becomes no more than an expendable tool in the shadow of ideology. Why? Because people turn things and ideas to their advantage. Isn't that part of our nature?
As Napoleon Bonaparte once said: "all great captains have performed vast achievements by conforming to the rules of nature -- by adjusting efforts to obstacles". In the same way, all great thinkers must test their ideas by adjusting to how things really are.
But they often don't. As Mr. Ball puts it: "Once we acknowledge the universality displayed in the physical world, it should come as no surprise that the world of human social affairs is not necessarily a tabula rasa open to all options"
In sum, this book may help liberate readers from "the propensity for linear thinking and to encourage a greater sophistication in their perception of cause and effect".
Which is exactly what we need, now more than ever.
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