The Fundamental Force Of People

The human world, like physics, can be reduced to four fundamental forces: culture, politics, war and business. That is also roughly the order of decreasing strength, increasing legibility and partial subsumption of the four forces. Here is a visualization of my mental model:

tumblr_inline_nt89fpQjcO1qc7p1s_540

[ Source : Venkatesh Rao : Ribbon Farm, via Stowe Boyd ]

It is a great article - click through and take a read. Since Stowe Boyd provided a link to this article in his feed, I now have added Ribbon Farm to my RSS Feed. But - as I read it, it reminded me of something I read on Wikipedia a couple of years ago. So I went to do some digging. This is what I came up with.

Bottom line - back in the 50s Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar developed this theory - which was then expanded in the 70s by Ravi Batra and then again since the 90s … Johan Galtung and Sohail Inayatullah - amongst others have taken a crack at building on the shoulders of giants.

This graphic is the key …

Law_of_Social_Cycle

… where I see 4 specific roles for people …

• Warriors
• Intellectuals
• Acquisitors
• Laborers

Is it just me - or do you also recognize a merging of very similar ideas. Coincidence?

• Warriors map to War
• Acquisitors map to Business
• Intellectuals map to the Cultural / Political spectrum

oh - and the ‘laborer’ - translation the majority of humanity - well we are

• the voters
• the workers
• the soldiers

Something gotta change … #VRM

This Was Originally Posted To Beyond Bridges

The site has been closed down and the material moved to this site for posterity.

The focus today is People First.

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