CRITILCAL MASS
CRITICAL MASS AND
SOCIAL DYNAMICS
Collective consiousness
Collective consiousness
Stes de Necker
In social dynamics, critical mass is reached when a
sufficient number of individuals adopt a certain innovation or common interest in
a social system, that causes the rate of adoption to become self-sustaining and
creates further growth.
The term is borrowed from nuclear
physics and in that field it refers to the amount of a substance needed to
start a chain reaction.
Critical mass may be closer to
majority consensus in political circles, where the most effective position is
more often that held by the majority of people in society.
In this sense, small changes in
public consensus can bring about swift changes in political consensus, due to
the majority-dependent effectiveness of certain ideas as tools of political
debate.
Critical mass is a concept used
in a variety of contexts, including physics, group dynamics, politics, public opinion, and technology. Social factors influencing critical mass may
involve the size, interrelatedness and level of communication in a society or one
of its subcultures, social stigma, or the possibility of
public advocacy due to such a factor.
Critical mass and the theories
behind it help us to understand aspects of humans as they act and interact in a
larger social setting and help us understand why humans do or adopt certain
things which are beneficial to them, or, more importantly, why they do not.
Much of this reasoning has to do
with individual interests trumping that which is best for the collective whole.
By its definition, "critical
mass" is the small segment of a societal system that does the work or
action required to achieve the common good. The "Production Function"
is the correlation between resources, or what individuals give in an effort to
achieve public good, and the achievement of that good.
Such function can be
decelerating, where there is less utility per unit of resource, and in such a
case, resource can taper off. On the other hand, the function can be
accelerating, where the more resources that are used, the bigger the payback.
There is a limit to how much
stress can be put on something before it is finally and irreversibly
destroyed. It goes by several different names. Critical mass,
tipping point, and system overload are but a few. In each case, the term
refers to an event that finally breaks the camel's back (to use yet another
term for the same thing).
The electoral surprises of the
recent municipal elections in South Africa came as an abrupt reminder to
politicians that the poor masses cannot be ignored, even as official attention
is lavished on a few islands of prosperity, on narrow, though stupendous,
successes in a few select areas.
The backlash has up until recently
been silent. That is changing. People are fed up. And the current
political debates and political mergers and positioning are merely the
rumblings of a volcano preparing to erupt.
While the Mugabe administration
has been clumsily stumbling from one catastrophe to the other, the current upheavals
are clearly a definite sign that a political mass has been reached in Zimbabwe
and the Zimbabweans are definitely in a transitional phase.
In most societies throughout the
world, political tolerance is not merely reaching its critical mass; it is
reaching it so swiftly that, predictably, there will be an abrupt and
catastrophic breakdown of historic proportions to come.
Internal security conditions in
many parts of India are already intolerable. Jammu & Kashmir, much of the
country's Northeast, and an almost continuous swathe of land along our their Eastern
border, from the Nepal border to Andhra Pradesh, which is afflicted by Left
Wing Extremist, or "Naxalite", high levels of violence and disorder,
compounded by great and enduring neglect are experienced daily.
Besides India, there are much
wider spheres in which security of life and property is, at best, tenuous.
In Bihar and Uttar Pradesh conditions
are near anarchical. Governance and the Constitution have long been forgotten
in the realpolitik of caste and communal alliances in these states, and the
local crime lord and goonda are a reality of everyday life that almost
everybody must deal with.
In Nepal, after the devastating
sweep of the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M), the Maoist power grew and
was continuously consolidated, even as the ill-equipped police force was
systematically targeted, and the Royal Nepalese Army (RNA) looked the other
way. It was only after the Army camp at Dang was attacked on November 23, 2001,
that the government began to address the problem with requisite seriousness,
deploying the Army, raising new paramilitary forces, and upgrading police
weaponry, communications and transport.
Today, all of Nepal, outside the
various district headquarters, has passed out of the control of the government.
Nepal is receiving millions of dollars in developmental aid from a range of
international agencies and friendly countries, but is in no position to execute
any projects, and some aid agencies have now made aid conditional on the
resolution of the conflict.
It is important, within this
context, to understand that anti-state groups and pressure groups do not have
to replace the state to wreak the havoc they desire. They have only to make the
agencies of the state ineffective, and to create and sustain disorder. The
state, on the other hand, has a far more onerous responsibility: It must not
only maintain order, it must effectively deliver a wide range of public goods
and services, absent which it is deemed to have "failed", creating
the spaces for the activities and dominance of anti-state and pressure groups.
All over the world, the
increasing criminalisation of politics, and the deepening
criminal-politician-bureaucratic-businessman nexus exposed in many recent
high-profile scandals, suggest that the situation has reached political
tolerance mass that can only be expected to worsen over time.
There is no need to list the
examples of political tolerance, or to be precise, political intolerance. The litany
of social upheavals eroding family, morals, and education in the Western world is
well known to those who follow such things. Likewise, the
accelerating advance of technology has affected us all in its breathtaking
speed. Beyond that, radical Islamist terrorism has become destructive not
merely in terms of its death toll, but also in the fact that it has become the
hate that dare not mention its name.
The exponentially increasing
revelations of truth that the alternative research community is exposing, is having
a profound effect. This uncensored research is based on efforts toward a more
honest, integrated and holistic worldview, using real history, honest facts and
trends, and accumulated information outside the controlled and censored media.
We need to take that awareness
and apply that as direct knowledge on other fronts and act accordingly.
The walls are coming down. The
wake up is clearly reaching critical mass.
The massive vibrational change of
public consciousness is palpable.
And more so by the day.
