Our relationships exist in multidimensional spheres. To get there from here and further, we should probably get rid of some misconceptions.

Getting Grounded In The Sphere

A belief in institutions did not bring mankind committees, churches, governments, unions and other things. A belief in institutions did not bring mankind health-care, spaceflight, commercial flight and the Internet. This belief in institutions did not bring us an economy based on markets. This belief in institutions did not make democracy the least wrong system of government on Spaceship Earth. This belief in institutions did not give us the modern multinational corporation.

This belief also didn't give us the Public Domain, Copyright, Patents and prosecuting children for sharing. This belief didn't make invading countries by getting 'public opinion' swayed a good thing.

There is no belief in institutions. The belief that makes us do these things is a belief that if we work together we can do things greater than if we had acted individually. The belief in institutions is that for a relationship to be worthwhile it must be permanent and must never change. 'Bureaucracy protects', says the old wisdom.

Change is uncomfortable, unsettling and unavoidable. It haunts us every morning in the mirror more and more as we become older. Where once a young man might celebrate a single hair on the chin, he might later reflect on that and remember the happiness while staring at a sea of grey swimming around the islands of black - maybe that makes change more painful as we grow older. No one really knows.

The uncomfortable reality is that, despite our best efforts, things change and it seems that they are constantly changing faster than our institutions can accommodate.

Yet we believe that we can do great things when we work together. In fact, we've shown it most recently with things like open source and open content. So working together also means, at least to some degree, sharing. But the great institutions we have built prohibit sharing, so the new sharing systems compete with the intellectual dole property systems. We get conflict - not to be mistaken for change though, all too often, it is mistaken.

So what we really have is an innate need to work together toward common goals. The institutional method, the institutional experiment, has failed to a large degree. This is not to say that institutions are not useful - they are - but their usefulness in many ways has been sorely lacking and their time of dominance is in twilight. Why? Maybe because mankind doesn't really work that way.

Maybe because our morals, our ethics - our very being - is trapped in the institutions that we have created and has become slowly cramped into a smaller and smaller space. Was Thoreau right?

Men have become the tools of their tools.

Or can we not take control of our institutions? We could, but something doesn't seem right. Something doesn't fit. And it's because we have come to see institutions that we have created as archaic, as holding us back, as not permitting us to meet our potential. And yet these same institutions have grown mankind to the point where it is now and that history serves as a reason not to change the way we do things. Yet something that has always worked is at increased risk of failure the longer it works.

It's a turning point, and it's a turning point toward systems that follow our own nature. Things like open source, open content, social media and other more extraneous social networks would never work if it wasn't closer to our normal way of doing things than institutions.

And this brings us to the Sphere.

The Sphere

We all exist within spheres, and all of our spheres are connected (if they weren't, you wouldn't be reading this). Our spheres are not made up of people, they are made up of relationships with others and things. Our relationships affect us and we affect our relationships - a quantum state of being where by changing a relationship we find ourselves changed. The people with which we have relationships demarcate the size of our sphere in different directions - it isn't really a sphere, but a sphere is the best introductory example. Some might call them holons, but the term is hardly visual or as commonly conceptual. And I don't necessarily agree with all of it as most examples tend to stop at an individual human being.

The relations skew our sphere in one direction or another and could even be seen as a form of pseudopod by which we maneuver ourselves until we find others with like skews. We gravitate to what we like, we are repulsed by what we don't like. The thing often mistaken for 'character' is the ability to avoid reacting to either - formalized a bit better through emotional intelligence. We're not exactly sure why it's so important for us to deal with things in a more neutral manner, but there is a strong possibility that moving around randomly until we find like spheres seems to waste a lot of time. Sometimes.

Yet our relationships define us just as much as we define our relationships. When we hate something and like another, we're tied to both through relationships. If, for example, we choose not to hate something and simply cut off our relationship, our sphere no longer has that hate pulling at the shape of the sphere. And that brings us to the finiteness of the sphere.

Spheres are not infinite. They are finite. We just don't know how finite, but we are pretty sure that one size does not fit all. Too many relationships within a sphere (relationship density) leads us to become stressed and adversely affects us. Too few relationships and we seek out relationships - and again, become stressed. Under stress, our spheres might first expand briefly before contracting - or it might simply become larger. Both are supposed to accommodate our needs, though this is not always the case.

Relationships

So what we really have in a society is a giant ball of relationships made up of smaller spheres. Each relationship we have touches on another sphere of relationships. Moving a stone affects not just you and the stone but every person who has or will come into contact with the stone should a relationship have existed and re-established at any point. For example, if I move a stone you have tripped over in the past and place it well away from where you could trip on it, the fact that I have moved the stone has practically ended your relationship with that stone - at least for a little while.

With people, it's not too different. We should be able to agree that, given the ability to choose our relationships, we have relationships with agreeable people and things. When we no longer agree, we would wish to end the relationship.

And so now we come back to the institution.

Not Opposed: Imposed

The institution is a very large sphere of its own. Spheres that find connections agreeable are attached to that sphere. They don't want the institution-sphere to go away. But then, off somewhere else, there are spheres that do not find the institution-sphere agreeable. They might be thrown together through Brownian motion, clinging to each other through something more akin to cohesion than adhesion.

When those like spheres become more dominant than the sphere supporting an institution, something strange happens. A new sphere is formed from all the smaller spheres and begins replacing the institution sphere over a period of time. That's a revolution.

The new sphere hardens to protect itself from the those that support the institution-sphere. It shields itself from relationships that it believes are not valuable or worthwhile. This is the new institution.

The cycle repeats because every revolution brings with it the unchanging spheres of its own destruction.

Or, to break the cycle, you have continuous revolution without the hardening.