----- Original Message ----- From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
>
> I submit that there is _Very_ little evidence that the overwhelming
> majority of humans have any tendency (personally) to "violence" (of
the
> sort that extinguishes bodies). From the agent end of your spectrum,
> clearly agents exist who will decide in the abstract that in pursuit
of
> various (structure-set) goals they will pursue policies that lead to
> huge violence. There is no evidence that agents exist to make such
> decisions outside a structure which generates the goals and the
capacity
> to reach those goals.
============
Ok. It's those goals-structure-set and the path dependency of locking in how they're communicated in large networks that triggers something analogous to a bank run that I'm interested in and how ethical responsibility drops out of the picture as the size of the network grows. What's that 'threshold'? Again, we have to be careful because structure is not an agent, nor is 'it' rigid. Indeed if it were rigid it would make easier the work skeptics engage in to expose the tragic dynamics of elite cognitions that set the collective action process on it's course. What's the 'informational-communicational' speed limit of resistance? Appositely, how did the pall over leftists in the US set in so quickly, or are we setting off our own analog to a bank run?
> All the evidence is that left to their own devices, a rather small
> scattering of agents will engage in violent behavior.
>
> With extraordinarily rare exceptions, even the more violent tend to
> commit their violence only within a small range of contexts.
>
> Carrol
========
Yes.
Ian