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Those who assume runaway feedback will trigger complete collapse may also be anticipating a phase shift--a sudden jump from one state to another. This concept has been popularized as a "tipping point" in the book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. In the stock market, such a shift takes the form of a reversal of trend; this is also visible in elections, when the electorate seeks to reverse polarities, so to speak, and place the other party in power.

But a system has to be near a tipping point or phase shift for little things to matter. This ties directly into our exploration of The Remnant and the Pareto Principle: seemingly small percentages of people leading by example can have an outsized influence on the "trivial many," slowly building a trend for change which can "phase shift" at certain points, changing the entire cultural milieu and mindset in a short period of time.

That is, phase shifts do not have to be collapses; they can also be relatively sudden "awakenings" or positive transformations wrought by the informal leadership of The Remnant or by a technological innovation which rapidly replaces a less efficient technology. The messy, lengthy revolution launched by the printing press is a good example of the latter; the Web/Internet is an example of a new technology that enables entirely new distributions of knowledge and levels of interactions.

Power Laws, Pareto Distribution, Self-Organized Criticalities (SOC) and the Stick/Slip Hypothesis

Phase shifts are an integral feature of the ontological models we first discussed in Chapter Three. We should be skeptical of any "natural laws" which are being applied to human culture and history, as history is littered with models derived from a specific time and society which claimed to be universal but which failed to map unfolding events.

The question for those applying power laws to human behavior and history is simple: what dynamic causes human history to follow power laws (distribution, SOC, etc.)? The answer is two-fold: one, humans are organisms and thus their large-scale behavior can be tracked statistically like that of other organisms. Two, the positive feedback loops of windfall exploitation and over-reach are causal mechanisms which explain how a minority can control most of the wealth and influence the "trivial many."

The power laws briefly described in Chapter Three provide large-scale models for the build-up of forces which then lead to sudden instability.

As an example, consider a broad, fertile valley and its human population. The first human inhabitants have stumbled on a windfall: a lush valley with good soil and water. They promptly proceed to exploit that windfall, and like all other organisms they proliferate rapidly in the presence of surplus food.

As the surplus and population grows, the surplus wealth accretes along Pareto distributions and some sort of governance, be it religious or secular, arises to protect the windfall from outsiders and to siphon off surplus for capital-intensive structures--defensive forts, palaces, temples, burial mounds, etc. Whatever form of governance gains the upper hand finds itself in a positive feedback: having vanquished its rivals (negative feedback forces) and shed restraints, it is now free to gather an ever larger share of the valley's surplus.

The productive land in the valley floor is quickly plowed in another positive feedback: the more land put into production, the more surplus is generated which spurs more productive labor, and so on.

As the population rises beyond what the valley's surplus can feed, then farmers move up to marginal land on the hillsides. But the soil is poorer and the labor required to irrigate and terrace the land is higher, so the surplus generated by tilling more soil diminishes as ever more marginal areas are brought into production. At a certain elevation, surplus drops to near-zero: the output (crops/food) only sustains the work required to plant, irrigate,