dan sullivan’s libertarian article ‘Common Rights versus Collective Rights’ http://geolib.com/sullivan.dan/commonrights.html blinds itself to this deeper issue, as does the notion of ‘anti-credentialism’. sullivan pushes off from his preferred foundational cornerstone that ‘every man has an equal right to use the land’. where does this anthropocentric absolutism come from and how do we justify it? sullivan doesn’t say, he simply uses it as a foundational starting point.

the fact is, we live within a commons, a shared space that is continuously evolving wherein we move under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence. only if we choose to ‘live in’ a world of abstraction where we ignore the common living space that we owe our being here to, does it ‘make (pseudo-) sense’ to build theory ‘bottom-up’ from men and their ‘equal rights’; i.e. to employ space-ignoring theoretical modeling. it behooves us to go back to the definition of a ‘collective’ in the general case, which is not simply a collection of individual anthropocentric constructivists, but a real community whose behaviour is being shaped by the shape of the hostspace in which it is situationally included.

a ‘crowd dynamic’ is a simple case in point. what we call a ‘crowd dynamic’ is not simply something that is constructed by a multiplicity of individuals doing their own deterministic thing. crowds are more generally confluences that the material entities (people/organisms) are continually flowing into and out of (as in traversing a ‘crowded’ intersection or piazza or park). it is a spatial-relational pattern that is inductively shaped both by the long term shape of the space (due to trees, ponds, buiildings, etc.) and by the short term patterns of differential spatial accommodating (virtual islands, channels, lagoons as associate with fluid flow). it is like the human organism that sustains its dynamical form even as atoms and molecules that compose it are continually ‘blowing through it’.

industrial activity has this kind of trans-generational ‘standing wave pattern’ (spatial-relationship based) associated with it. people are born and raised and caught in its cyclonic spin as youths, spun about for forty odd years and then whipped out of it in their latter years. the so-called ‘free-market economy’/capitalism has this kind of trans-generational standing wave pattern to it, that sucks people in, whips them around and about, and flips them on out again, generation after generation.

it is impossible, then, to realistically speak of a collective as some kind of constructivist group of collaborators when such ‘space-ignoring’ forward deterministic dynamics cannot be found anywhere in nature other than in the worlds of abstraction that live in the heads of humans (newtonian models are abstractions that approximate nature’s dynamics; i.e. if we abstract the objects out of the flow, we can show that newtonian determinism holds, but only because it starts from the objects and what they do and ignores the outside-inward accommodative quality of space that shapes collective flow-dynamics. newton openly acknowledged this shortfall (the missing source of celestial self-organizational harmonies) in ‘Principia…’ and said he hoped some other philosophy would be able to resolve it. ).

this gap between ‘what a group of people do’ and ‘the behaviour of a group of people’, … which comes about when we acknowledge the role of space (the accommodating quality of space that shapes the collective behaviour of the assertive agents inclusionally situated within it), is something that has been recognized in the ‘complexity sciences’ and gives rise to the observation (e.g. by stuart kaufman) that; ‘the structure of the organization is also the record of the embodied know-how’.

the modern individual in the social collective may claim that he has ‘free will’ and that what he does is what he chooses to do and ditto for a collaborative group of his fellows, … but in fact his/their canoe tends to get sucked into the trans-generational cyclonic crowd dynamic and spit out later on, regardless. in this respect his ‘free will’ and that of his fellow collective looks more like that of the group in the cart being taken to the guillotine. they are free to sing and to dance and to swear and rail at the crowds lining the street, … but none of this bears on their inextricable inclusion within an evolutionary (or locally revolutionary) flow-dynamic.

evidently, there is a major difference in seeing ‘collective behaviour’ in terms of ‘what a group of people do’ versus ‘the behaviour of a group of people’, and that difference arises depending upon whether one’s mental models account for the behaviour-shaping role of the accommodative quality of space, or not. ‘reductionism’ of the type employed by dan sullivan’s libertarian rant on ‘common rights vs. collective rights’ ignores the accommodative behaviour-shaping role of space and works forward one-sidedly on the basis of ‘what people do’ and ‘what people should do’. in this highly simplified mental model, the future is constructed from the immediate past by the assertive agents that are in place at the time (the influence of trans-generation standing wave spatial-relational patterns is not even acknowledged.)

but it is not just libertarian reductionism that can fall into this over-simplifying trap, there is also an exposure to a p2p collective reductionism.

in the north american native tradition, nature’s hostspace is accepted as the supreme shaper of the collective behaviour of those of us who are included within it (everyone, apart from us westerners when we choose to ignore our inclusional experience and live in a world of thought-based abstraction in our heads). as the naturespace we are included in transforms, so transforms our collective and individual behaviour just as surely as bears hibernate and wildgeese migrate with the seasons as an experiential response rather than by being knowledge-driven.

our anthropocentrism and our reductionist mental modeling tools are not capable of over-turning this natural reality. the native elder knows that ‘the structure of the organization is also the record of the embodied know-how’ (though in a nature-oriented rather than western-culture-abstraction oriented way) and his job is to share this with youth so that youth do not form collectives that grow up with the anthropocentric space-ignoring belief that they can construct a new reality from scratch.

at the same time, they do not have to put their canoe into the capitalist cyclone any more than they would put it it into the maelstrom of a white water riverflow. that comes about in western youthful collectives since it is not only condoned by the most powerful authority figures in the culture but one is rewarded for giving oneself up to it and likewise punished (deprived of opportunity and sustenance) if one does not. as far as the elders go, those who have refused the gold watch that commemorates their fifty years of ‘service’, … they no longer have a voice to share the ‘full story’ with youth since it is the middle aged most powerful, the stewards and gatekeeper committed to persistence of the system, that control the media.

should elders have any more say than youth in guiding the behavioural dynamics of a collective? (note that this is not the same question as ‘rank-thinking’ versus ‘peer-thinking’ though it exposes the superficiality of the modeling behaviour in terms of ‘thinking’.)

the point is not that ‘their thinking’ is any better and deserves some kind of ‘rank-’ related weighting, the point is that their participative experience is richer than that of youth, their intuition of how ‘the structure of the organization is also the record of the embodied know-how’, since they have not only been at the point of entry of putting their canoes into the capitalist cyclone and seen the promise that it offers, but having lived the experience full cycle, have come to understand the difference between ‘what a group of people can do’ (space-ignoring) and ‘the behaviour of a group of people’ (inductively shaped by the accommodative backpressure of the space they are situationally included in).

‘what a group of people can do’, for example, whether by p2p collaboration or by hierarchical control, is to produce pharmaceuticals that fail to participate in natural confluent cycles of renewal so that they persist and concentrate to toxic levels in the common hostspace with the result that the group that has access to the last of the uncontaminated water sources may implicitly extort behavioural shaping of the social collective. in general, the commons of our shared living space is the mediating shaper of the behaviour of social collectives. to start ‘from the other end’ and model social organization in the anthropocentric terms of the constructive acts of ‘independent’ people who someone has endowed with ‘equal rights to the land’ is to omit the natural precedence of the accommodating quality of the land (the common hostspace) with its cycles of self-renewal and its provision of essentials to its inhabitants, access to which is a greater motivator than the forward-asserting constructivism of a collective which fails to even consider the accommodative quality of the common hostspace as the over-riding shaper of human behaviour (the group in the cart on the way to the guillotine understands very well how the hostspace dynamic they are situated in ‘trumps’ their local free-will based constructivist capacities.)

the bottom line?

‘what groups of people do’ based on their knowledge and their thinking does not teach us ‘how groups of people behave’, … the difference being that the former fails to comprehend the over-riding role of the accommodative quality of our common hostspace dynamic in shaping our collective behaviour.

its true that we can stop putting our canoe into the trans-generational cyclone RIGHT NOW, but it’s not true that we can, as a p2p collective co-create a desired new tomorrow. we live within the evolving space of the continuing present and every action we take or every suspension of action that we were taking can be seen in the larger context of transformation of the hostspace dynamic we are all included in.

activities like the open software movement are important illustrators of how we can collaborate in a manner that helps us navigate within the (inevitable) evolutionary flow dynamic, in the manner of the sailor who garners his power and his direction from his situational inclusion in the flow. this contrasts with the space-ignoring (reductionist) notion that a p2p collective can co-construct a desired future in the manner that a power-boat proceeds deliberately and intentionally towards its goal, consuming enormous resources in the process and infusing much turbulence into the shared hostspace that will continue to build and ‘blow back in one’s face’.

p2p collectives can choose to take the (coevolutionary) sailing tack, or the powerboat (constructivist) tack. the latter approach demands that everyone in the boat first agree on the destination while the former orients first to sustaining balance and harmony with the dynamical hostspace one is situationally included in. an example is the emergent open software movement (participants did not have to agree on an explicit destination, only on how extract power and steerage from the flow that they share inclusion in).