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Complexity increases fragility and the potential for system collapse. This principle tells us one thing when applied to human society: we are heading into very risky territory. There is a real potential for us to go straight back to the stone age after a near extinction. This is staring us in the face. Such a process could occur over a period of a few years and involve war, civil war and starvation the like of which has never been experienced before.
A solution, one which may already be occurring through a process of evolutionary self-organisation of the human species is known as rhizome. Rhizome is the antithesis of the foundations of civilisation, hierarchical power. Think of collaboration, networks of networks, My Space, Wikipedia, Open Source Software, intentional community networks, think of terrorist cells. Jason Godesky makes this point with great clarity so I won’t attempt to replicate it.
My point is simple: we can decide either to cling to outdated notions of centralised power and hierarchical civilisation or we can localise power in our immediate communities. Communities can be physically localised or information communities localised by common information context. Open Source Software is a fundamental example since it provides each user with a copy of the same solution to a problem and each user has the ability to input improvements to that solution.
We now have the tools to act locally – to go back to Aristotle’s fundamental unit of human society, the village – while communicating directly and globally under shared information contexts. Here is the practical solution to acting locally and thinking globally, and it is beginning to happen. For the those who cling to conventional civilisation the future looks bleak, but those whose choose to become part of the solution are looking at a potential renaissance of human life in sustainable form. Sustainable because in the village we must all take responsibility for our actions, since the effects our our actions are immediate: what goes round comes back round to us immediately.
The power of the rhizome is that it is, like a virus, able to adapt and outwit centralised attempts to kill it. Centralised power cannot compete and will either collapse under its own complexity or evolve into rhizomatic organisation. We are already witnessing the beginning of that collapse and the potential end of all that is wrong with conventional society, capitalism, social hierarchy, and war.
What we are looking at is anarchy. Not anarchy in its pejorative sense, that is hierarchical civilisation’s propaganda against its worst enemy. True anarchy is not chaos but balanced self-organisation: distributed control rather than centralised control. A self-regulating human society. The question is whether we can adapt quickly enough to rhizomatic organisation before centralised civilisation collapses.
‘Get your hair cut!’ Few men have not had that phrase thrown at them at one time or another. Other phrases like ‘long haired layabout’, and the social pressures against men who whose hair is ‘like girls’, have always intrigued me.
When I discovered that the basis of current attitudes to men and their hair is over 2000 years old I was surprised. Not many cultural attitudes endure for that long. The ones that do tend to have some value or they soon fade. It seems that the reason for long hair being favoured is that it has a strong connection to war and power and the related concept of civilisation. The Macedonians and Romans chose short hair initially because their warriors cut their hair so that an enemy could not get a hold of it in battle. Short hair then became associated with war and power so that a mark of a ‘civilised’ society [1] was one in which men have short hair. This also says a lot about the foundations of what we call civilised societies, in which the monopoly over state use of force has now become the routine use of force not for defence and maintaining order but for increasing geopolitical power and control over the supply of resources [2].
The notion that real men have short hair has remained in Western culture to this day. However, if people understood the roles of warfare and the centralised power that are inherent in the current configuration of civilised [3] societies, then many more men would be reluctant to cut their hair short. Short hair and business attire make the statements: I wear the uniform of the industrial-military complex; I am a fighting (competitive) man. I acquiesce to the expedient abuse of capitalism, competition, centralised power, warfare. I acquiesce to the ideologies associated with empire, exploitation, poverty, and the headlong technological and globalised rush to grab what is left of the earth’s resources before the planet’s ability to support six billion people collapses. Short male hair is associated with the future deaths of millions of children. Men: discuss this with your hairdresser/barber. Women: cut your hair short and expect a lot of negative attention for subverting the communication purpose of short hair, for appropriating our symbol of control.
- I use the term civilised here alongside the term war because one aspect of civilised human society is that it is based on war and the centralisation of power. Those who engage in war are supported by the elites in society (centralised power) and aspects of the warrior mindset tend to be embraced by civil culture – e.g. corrupt business and public practices, competitiveness, might-makes-right, poverty, short hair, etc. The US administration’s Dick Cheney calls it ‘Our way of life’.
- I use the term control over the supply of resources precisely. This does not mean ownership of resources. Ownership comes through other power differential processes which a state uses to attract the resources to itself, as if by right but usually by might and resulting in some aweful living and working conditions for those in the countries from where the resources are being stripped.
- Civilised is used here to mean the distinction between the centralised power and political systems required for urbanised peoples and the distributed localised power and culture of pagans (the people of the fields).
