The Emergentsia

Article by Brent Cooper. Part Two is here. 

And yet Bonnita Roy, one of these Emergentsia, notes the following more indicative of the collaborative commons than an elite leading the way:

"In a world as diverse in people and rich in meanings as ours, big change might come from small acts by everyone operating everywhere in the contexts that already present themselves in their ordinary lives."

So a key question is how do we reach and influence ordinary people? Especially when they have a reasonable aversion to the elite and their theories of social engineering?


One way is to directly improve their lives through voting in legislators that enact polices, like having a living wage, protecting unions, universal healthcare, free college etc. This provides for our lower needs so that we have the opportunity to pursue things like self actualization.

But again, we still have to influence people to vote for such policy makers, and that is a huge challenge given the vast spin machine that operates to fool them into voting against their own, and society's, best interest.

Which of course requires we master framing ourselves, how to communicate to ordinary people in a way that leads them to act, ie vote and be political active. And speaking to them of social engineering is counterproductive.

And which, by the way, requires us to understand the cognitive science of reason itself so that we can see our own mistaken notions of it, including complexity in human development, and proceed accordingly.