Beauty, Murmurations & Economic fallacies

In 2011 Sophie Windsor Clive and Liberty Smith, a couple of British friends and filmmakers posted a short film that still remains in my memory as one of the most authentically beautiful and awe inspiring videos on the Internet.

The film follows the journey of the two girls in a canoe on a river, and how they find themselves surrounded by a murmuration of starlings, the incredible natural phenomenon of thousands of birds acting together in perfect synchronicity, as if together they've become a gigantic, fluid and alien entity moved by its own invisible will.

The murmuration is one of the most spectacular and used examples to explain the emerging properties of complex systems. The complex nature of the murmuration, bigger than the sum of the individual starlings, its shape and patterns of movement emerge from a set of very simple rules: "nearby birds would move further apart, birds would align their direction and speed, and more distant birds would move closer". Evolution favors this behavior for a number of reasons not totally disclosed yet to science (warmth, safety against predators, information sharing...). whatever the advantages are, there's something clear for the starlings, their are as far as they belong to the murmuration. There's no starling without murmuration, no murmuration without starlings.

Social animals

From the distance, humans are starlings, and society a murmuration. There's no human without society, and society without humans. We flow along life together, following a simple set of rules, cooperating to increase our chances of survival, reproduction and wellbeing. We are as far as we belong to the social murmuration. We are only in relation to others, in isolation we cease to be. The only difference is that while the set of rules that drive the starlings are the elegant result of millions of years of an evolutive processes, we, humans, developed the capacity of overwriting our own biological rules and replace them with some made-up ones, it's what we call 'culture'.

Our social murmuration takes different shapes depending on the rules set by a given culture in a given time. But our cultural evolution is still a clumsy process, it lacks the millions of years of trial and error optimization of the organizational system of those feathered little creatures. We must step from time to time out of our individualities in order to see the shape and dynamics of our murmuration, maybe this way we can understand the emerging properties of our collective interactions and see how they affects us and our social and environmental context.

The murmuration of starlings is an elegant and efficient entity, its behavior is more complex than anything that the individual starling can achieve by itself, it transcends the nature of the individual to form a whole of emerging beauty.

Capitalist murmurations

The example of the murmuration of starlings may helps us to reflect on the nature of capitalism as a complex system and to understand the shape of its emergent properties. The basis of capitalism is a set of simple cultural rules that overwrites our natural connections. Within the capitalist murmuration our relations are mediated by the principle of "economic rational optimization based on self-interest". Its success relies on its capacity of using desire to enhance the self-interest principle that is already in us, so capitalism feels natural and behaves in darwinian terms. Capitalism settles on top of our social connectivity and develops a symbiotic relation with it.

From this perspective, the goal of neoliberal politics, as the extreme version of this late techno-capitalism is to replace every single social connection with a transactional one, so at the end, every relation becomes an economic one. If you believe in the rationality of the homus economicus, that's fine, you would expect a self-regulated murmuration of starlings collaborating only by thinking on their own benefit. But if you mistrust human rationality and individual egotism as the main drivers of our behaviors, then, you should start reconsidering the whole system.

My take is that as we understand that the murmuration is an inseparable part of the nature of the starling, we should consider that we are not driven just by self-interest but by an innate sense of ontological collaborative altruism. If we stop collaborating, we stop being. We are humans because we are social, because we are an inseparable component of a complex network of interactions with the environment, a network of codependency based on a set of deep evolutionary rules of individual, social and ecological engagement, a fuzzy but profoundly real sense of kindness and generosity.

The rules of engagement

Most of the issues that we are facing as society and co-inhabitants of the only liveable planet we know so far, are overwhelmingly complex. Those issues are direct consequences of running the cultural/relational algorithm that we gave ourselves. Climate Change is not an externality, but the obvious result of applying the rule of infinite growth on top of limited resources. The loss of biodiversity is not casual, but the result of a hierarchical and utilitarian view of nature. Inequality is not an undesired consequence of capitalism, but the logic path of an economy that rewards the rapacious accumulation over the generous distribution of wealth. The epidemic mental health issues in western societies are directly linked to increased uncertainty, the disappearance of meaningful connections and of emotional safety nets, which are themselves the effect of a culture of over-individualism, a rule that suits perfectly the nature of the markets, but not the nature of people.

Our current murmuration display great features of self-growth, dynamism and scale but its shape doesn't seem to come out very beautifully, and its effects on other psychological, biological and environmental systems are just disastrous.

It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism

The point here is that systemic issues that seem too complex to tackle emerge from the ongoing tiny interactions that we establish among us, interactions based on very basic cultural rules (economic, ideological, social, religious). Those relational rules are normally invisible to us, they are "embedded" inside our ideological ether, we breathe them, they are part of what we are, they drive our lives and decision-making, they decide for us what to do and what to desire. But they are just made-up rules, "designed" rules, as arbitrary as the rules of a board game.

I fully agree with above quote, mentioned by that late Mark Fisher on his book Capitalist Realism, it's indeed impossible to imagine alternatives to the existent systems, it's impossible because those systems are too complex to be imagined, there are too many variables in play, too many unknowns, dependencies and dynamics, those are systems that are too big and too invisible at once.

Maybe we just have to stop trying to imagine what is unimaginable.

Relationality

What if instead we focus on rethinking the rules?

Another great way of looking at systems is the mathematical concept of "cellular automata", it explains how complex entities emerge from running a very simple set of rules, and also how by changing those basic rules you can change the whole system.

In Conway's Game of Life, a fascinating and simple visualization of the cellular automata, we can see how complex shapes and behaviors appear from running a simple algorithm that defines the relation among a dot and its neighbors. The emerging shapes are somehow implicit in the rule itself, they appear as result of the dynamic interaction of multiple elements following the same rules.

Those patterns, as well as the murmurations, are functional systems that do not need to be designed, they are just the consequence of letting the right algorithm to get loose.

Can we imagine a creative process that does not focus on "designing" stuff, but on setting up a set of relational rules with the intention of activating emerging behaviors that produce positive systemic outcomes?

Shared Value

As an example of the above, I've been applying a strategic model to my work with corporations that aims to reframe the understanding of the businesses by changing the definition of the relation with their ecosystems. The model (that I describe in more detail here: Creating Shared Value), proposes a redefinition of the relational components of a business: What if instead of trying to maximize the transactional value of a relation, driven by self-interest, we focus on building shared value?

The experience of applying the model to business challenges is very rich and transformational. The outcome is never a particular product or service, but a whole dynamic activation of networked intentions, a business murmuration driven by a shared purpose.

Redefining the rules of engagement is not an easy task, it requires a radically different working mindset and a lot of persuasion, but it really works.

Beyond Design, or The Art of Kindness

A simple change of direction or speed of an individual starling can change the shape of the whole murmuration.

So let's...

Focus on writing the principles that define the relation among the elements of a system.

Stop designing stuff and think on imagining impact. (Stef Silva)

Provoke change by letting solutions emerge by themselves.

Define systems of co-dependency instead of individual empowerment.

Avoid trying to deal with things too big to handle and try to have an effect on what's near and immediate.

Stop thinking on scale, but on propagation of change.

And above all, let's try to replace the reigning principle of self-interest with the innate rule of kindness.

Maybe this is the only way for our future murmurations to emerge as something meaningful, beautiful and kind.

thanks,