Culture is Emergent Equilibrium

Emergent behavior is fascinating.

It is normal.

Normal both in the 'regular' sense and in the Normal Distribution sense.

Analyzing Person #1 acting in their own self-interest is a case-study. If that person is you, it is introspection. I hope you've been doing that lately. Try it.

Now, add a Person #2 into the mix and see how they behave with #1. This becomes a dynamic. They will respond to each other's behavior while being mindful of their self-interest.

Mind you, I'm not suggesting that self-interest is selfish. It is merely the interest of the self. What does your self like doing. If you are a philanthropist, your self-interest is philanthropy and how that makes you feel.

Now, add a Person #3 and then a Person #4 and so on. What you have at some person-number, is a society or a people. A society does not have its own directed goals. It does not possess a self-interest. It is slave to the self-interest of its component members.

However, there are emergent behaviors which arise from the inter-play of the individuals, the context in which they are playing.

Emergent behavior is complex. It is stratified. It is integrated. It is built from thousands of micro-actions, and the collective memory of the consequences of those micro-actions.

Think about how you behave out in the world. Or if you'd prefer think about how someone you know does.

When they cross a road, do they look on both sides? When they talk, do they make eye contact? How do they react to the presence of pets, of animals, of kids. Each of those observations... combined, is their personal behavior. And the aggregate of that personal behavior over a large enough 'people-number' is culture.

But, the combination is not merely an amalgamation, it is more like a chemical reaction. Because the behavior is either re-inforced or adjusted by the response that people have to each other.

Let's talk behaviors that we'd all like to see more of.

Littering. Those who don't litter were around people who don't litter. By a large number of social cues, they now recognize that they don't want to be the ones littering.

Think about the first time, as a kid, they may have dropped a candy wrapper. A parent, a teacher, a friend, a fellow-toddler would have responded somehow. Either by cleaning up after them or, by telling them off, or by simply throwing their own candy wrapper into the big bin. Social cues like a demonstration, or being told off, or seeing someone else do what you should have done lives on as an effect. A speck of learned behavior.

Now let's talk about behaviors we'd all like to see less of.

Spitting. On the road. In the OUTSIDE!

Those who spit would have grown around people who do. Or perhaps they learnt it more recently. Either way, you don't spit if you haven't seen someone else spit, and get away with it. The consequence or the lack there of results in an effect similar to the one we saw in the littering example. A speck of learned behavior.

Note, I am talking of people as being devoid of will-power. Of being unable to think, in course of their actions and changing it or being more intentional. This is because most behavior is not rational, it is a force of habit that you'd not pay heed to unless someone brought it up.

Changing lanes in a car. Holding the door open. The speed at which you walk. The way you hold a spoon. We are operating on auto-pilot throughout the majority of actions we do on the daily.

Emergent Equilibrium

This neutral state. This equilibrium. The equilibrium that we arrived at without agreeing to it. This is as an EE. An emergent equilibrium.

And the thing with emergent equilibria is that they are impersonal. They do not have a tight grip on the society at large. They change too.

Though, not to say that they are easy to change. Just that... they do.

An equilibrium can be disturbed. In fact, for any change to come about, the equilibrium must be disturbed. We have countless examples of equilibria changing.

At the turn of the last-but-one century, horses were the way to get around. They were fast, cheap, and well, better than walking in the elements.

But, along comes the automobile and within a decade or two. Whoosh! (Or neigh!!) Those who can (almost everyone in North American cities) is driving or being driven around in a carriage.

In Bengaluru, before 2020, you would walk to a store near you to buy what you need. But come BigBasket, Zepto and BlinkIt and now you'd have to be a special kind of someone to walk to a store. Ain't nobody got the time for that.

So, the emergent equilibrium is usually an unstable equilibrium. It changes in response to the context, the behaviors exhibited by the people, or more interestingly the behaviors the context teases out of the people.

Think about the quick-commerce example. People's behaviors changed in response to the context. The people didn't wake up one day and decide to change, but the context drew out a specific kind of behavior. That behavior built up a critical mass and then everyone started to do the same. You'd be considered a luddite if you were to go to an actual physical store. (Well, maybe I'm indulging in hyperbole... But you get the point.)

So, culture is an emergent equilibrium. It is an aggregation of hundreds of micro-behaviors and actions that become the combined pulse of the people. But, it can be changed.

If that doesn't make you optimistic, well that's okay.

It does give me hope.

We (plural, as a society) could change.