Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [86]
7. The pendulum swings the other way as the innocent begin to fight back against their accusers and skeptics demonstrate the falsity of the claims.
8. Finally, the movement begins to fade, the public loses interest, and proponents are shifted to the margins of belief.
Why should there be such movements in the first place, and what drives these seemingly dissimilar systems in such a parallel manner? Stewart’s self-organization and complexity explain how disordered systems become more and more complex until they reach a critical point upon which there is a dramatic change. Bak and Chen’s self-organized criticality shows that at that point, when the system is in a critically balanced state, any stimulus may trigger a catastrophe. Not to be outdone in neologisms, John Casti calls this interactive process complexification, expressed by the interaction of two systems, such as an investor with the stock exchange, or with more general “feedback/feedforward loops” in the economy.29 Feedback systems are those whose outputs are connected to their inputs in such a manner that there is constant change in response to both, much like microphone feedback in a PA system, or heart-rate monitoring in a biofeedback system. The rate of information exchange is the mechanism that fuels the feedback loop and drives growth to the point of criticality (e.g., stock prices go up and down in response to normal buying and selling; booms and busts are driven by a flurry of buying or selling when the system reaches criticality).
Social movements self-organize, grow, reach a peak, and then collapse, all described by corollaries 1-5. To be more descriptive, to the model of contingent-necessity I add here:
Corollary 6: Between origin and bifurcation, sequences self-organize through the interaction of contingencies and necessities in a feedback loop driven by the rate of information exchange.
In all of these social movements, from the witch crazes of centuries past to the New Age claims of today, one can find these nonlinear systems. The witch crazes are repeating themselves as these modern descendants because of the similarity of the components of the systems (the eight points above) and parallel social conditions in history, such as socioeconomic stresses, cultural and political crises, religious and moral upheavals, the social control of one group of people by another in power, and a feeling of loss of personal control and responsibility such that an enemy is needed to blame. So it was for the witch crazes in England and New England (Salem), triggered by the social stresses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. So it is for these New Age movements today, following sharply on the heels of the turbulent 1960s, the areligious and amoral 1980s, and the egalitarian and victimized 1990s.
These disordered social systems self-organize when a few claims are communicated to the society at large primarily through the oral tradition (in the sixteenth century) and the mass media (today). The feedback loop is then in place. A woman is accused of being a witch and is publicly burned. News of the event spreads by word-of-mouth. (A woman in therapy “remembers” being abused and accuses her father. Her story is published in a few journals and small newspapers.) Suddenly other women in the community are similarly accused and burned. Neighboring communities hear about it and begin their own purge. (Suddenly other women who read these stories of abuse enlist in therapy and recall their own repressed memories.) The system is now growing more complex. As the rate of information exchange increases, the positive feedback loop grows and the event snowballs into a full-blown social movement. Witches are held responsible for all of the community’s woes and are accused, tried, and burned en masse. (Repressed memory is the subject of all the talk shows, magazine programs, tabloids, major newspapers, and self-help books. Women are accusing their alleged assailants en masse.) Figure 9.2 shows the growth