A recent Science News article, Swarm Savvy: How bees, ants and other animals avoid dumb collective decisions, offer insight into the mysterious dynamics all social animals share… including humans I’d say.
Ever since I can remember, I’ve been dumbfounded by how well we are able to manage the logistics in dynamic civilizations composed of millions of individuals. I know supply and demand plays a big role in this. Still, it mystifies me.
I’m probably more bewildered than most, as I seem to have inherited a somewhat meager helping of ‘the social gene’, so to speak. The advantage of that has been that I’ve always been better able than most to think and act outside the box. It is not that I want to or try to. Being less connected socially just makes me naturally less susceptible to group think. As you might guess, the negative aspects of this eccentricity counterbalance the positive ones.
Chapter 17’s The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects gives me perspective on this when I think of it as speaking to me personally — internally.
Surely, the best of all rulers is the genetic process that sets each individual’s life in motion. Inheritance is certainly a shadowy presence, and we can definitely say it happened to us naturally, as the chapter says at the end. Am I reading too much into this? Not from the standpoint of what chapter 56 refers to as mysterious sameness. How could one ever read too much into mysterious sameness? The more I feel it in everything, the closer I come to what Buddha called the Right State of Peaceful Mind. Conversely, dwelling on differences, is just asking for a fight, either within myself or with others. The motto, “choose your battles wisely” applies here. Trusting that differences truly represent reality is just begging for endless conflict.
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