Compounding Loops

The theory that society exists as a looping continuum

Humans Meet Environment

I believe that environment impacts nearly everything about our lives. In the question of nature vs. nurture, I’m a gung-ho proponent of nurture. I can speak to this in a variety of lenses, though the one top of mind for me now, as I reflect on the travel I’ve done in the year of 2022, is how societal-level habits, tendencies, and state of mind is shaped by our environments. Environment constitutes many things: culture, people, weather, structures, all contributing to society at large, where we find multiple chicken-and-egg loops made fro the components listed. For instance, the environment creates a certain mindset of the people, and the mindset that the people collectively carry shapes the aura of the environment for which they are in. Sunny weather lifts the spirits of people, lifted spirits of people make new comers feel lifted as well just by shear force of assimilation, which is then also perpetuated by the weather as both reflect onto personal happiness. The way we construct and display our buildings, and the way we live within them, also is a societal loop. In a sense, every modern day society is a series of compounding loops within each environment.

This holds true for both the beautiful and ugliest parts of societies. In San Francisco, the lack of affordable housing and rise of homelessness plagues the streets, affecting the operating hours that local businesses feel comfortable being open to closing earlier, causing a back-of-head panic as the night blankets the down and making a society that retracts into our own homes earlier into the night. A stark contrast to New York, which although has a comparably bad homelessness problem is fortunate to have higher numbers and concentration of those who are fortunate to live above it; a strength in numbers scenario that demands places to stay open later, combined with a hustler culture that levies for the presence of more outside-of-work activities, whereas on the west coast, with a general lower level of hustle than the east, we find balance in other ways than a necessity for an extensive nightlife scene.

This is a small example of a single loop that leaves a dent on the society it’s located in. Now, picture thousands of these loops, all with different contexts and variables, all constantly spiraling in wild shapes around each other. That’s the mental model for how our factors in our environment interact with our feelings, and how the intersection of humanity and environment create a myriad of chicken-and-egg loops that perpetuate societies as we know it.

Humans Ponder Change

Questions that naturally beg our leaders is how we can instantiate societal-level change. This is something I’ve given much thought to, especially as I’ve been an traveler of each of the four corner cities of our country in 2022 (Boston/NY, Miami, LA, SF), seen what different people stand for and believe in, though I also believe that the catharsis to this requires an understanding of the variables that shape our society. I believe that one person’s mandate, or a certain person as part of the government, won’t have an affect on it; instead, I believe that to change culture we need to instantiate new loop compounds that people can naturally build upon to shape new ways of doing things. I believe this to be best achieved through great technology.

Nothing can break loops, create loops, and act as a catalyst origin like technology. Every great movement in human history can be attributed to some great breakthrough, from the printing press to the early iteration of computers (and even modern computers are still in their earliest stage of computation), to engines, iterations of mobility and vehicles, advances in manufacturing techniques and agricultural output, dating back to the first (likely) woman who from a simple observation of the wind and flowers, decided to bury seeds into the ground on a hypothesis that new fruit would be yielded, and on said experiment gave our species a newfound power to control the regeneration of life and food around us. Our world is shaped by technology, our humanity shaped by the society in which we construct around it.

It is for these reasons that I find myself in a gravitational pull toward technology, and the visionaries that are leading it. They are who I place my bet on for those capable of changing the world, and I find myself perhaps too removed from the political scene in this regard. The way I see it is society and political leaders are the product of how we govern humans in a world that was shaped by technology. Each big bang of our existence is catalyzed by technology, which then politics fill to govern the body of our existence before the next technological wave hits. The who and the what that exists at the onset of unforeseen waves that will lead to new loops being created is what truly excites me, and that is the reason why straddling the identities of a builder and investor are where I’ve found my early adult life to reside.

The belief that change is top-down is where innovation dies; the inheritance of individual agency amongst a group of people — realizing that you, and everyone around you, are blessed with the keys to the future — is where the beginning of innovation takes route, in knowing that change is decentralized and every person on the planet is fully capable of it.

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” — Leo Tolstoy

Non-Humans Break Loops

We covered how the world around us can be graphed as a series of many, many loops that together result in the energetic engine that shapes our society. To change a facet of society is to first look at the loops for what they are at their core: an interaction of humans with the physical world. To better the world, then, is to build new loops that cause others to break. We can achieve this through technology.

The first step to creating better technology, though, is to create people who internalize the belief that they are the ones to address the problems and issues in the world around them, that they have the power to mold their world as they want to see it and have the responsibility to employ that power. It is an idealistic sounding thing, but I believe that idealism is what is needed to spur on actions that break free of existing loops, since it is in the absence of thinking inside of society that we can then harness the wherewithal to understanding how we’ll one day change it. Thus why the greatest of innovators of our species have all been a little bit coo-coo in the head, since the level-headed person finds comfort in conforming to the 6 walls of our safety boxes — it speaks to the part of us that seeks structure to follow.

Those that think absent of boxes think in ways that go against human nature, and often carry quirky personalities to back up on odd mental framework.

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” ― Rob Siltanen

A world in which not only those that are crazy internalize the belief that they can change the world, but also those that are level-headed but acknowledge that the power to change comes from within themself, is an idealistic world indeed. I don’t think we’ll ever get there, since our nature is fighting against it and each new wave of technology inherently creates new boxes that people think within. The internet, while great, obstructs the free thinking of creation since we can easily look up the answers to any problem that we might encounter. We go to grocery stores as our source of food without questioning the supply lines that get the there. Technological advances are both a beauty and a box, as people close their minds around what they know without questioning what new things could be created. As Henry Ford so famously said,

“If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.”

People base expectations on their environment: the cards they are handed and the society they conform to around them. What they are given impacts what they hold to be the constraints of knowledge. This, combined together, dictates their actions and shapes societies, contributes to loops, and builds the world as we know it.

For those that can see between and beyond societal loops, and are hungry to gobble the outskirts of knowledge to contribute to something new, our future rests in your hands.