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Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe

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Laurence Bergreen

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“[Standard social science approaches to analyzing conflict] too often miss the unintended consequences of well-intentioned acts. Dietrich Dorner is a German psychologist who studies leadership and decision making in complex environments. He has suggested that there is more harm done in today's world by well-intentioned people trying to do good, who are unaware of the unintended consequences of their actions, than by people actually trying to cause harm. Remarkably, this may well be true.”

WarConflictGood IntentionsUnintended ConsequencesIntractable ConflictSocial ConflictsThe Road To Hell
Book:The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts
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“One might ask, how could that most basic element of all human freedoms, the freedom to make promises and commitments and thus build relationships, be turned into its very opposite: into peonage, serfdom or permanent slavery? It happens, we’d suggest, precisely when promises become impersonal, transferable – in a nutshell, bureaucratized.”

SlaveryBureaucracySocial RelationsFreedomsImpersonal Markets
Book:The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
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“…it is certain that there are many things to which our language ascribes meaning indicative of a material substance, where simple contemplation indicates that it is largely referential in nature. The conditions or circumstances in our private, political, social and economic lives are such relations; we speak and behave as if these ‘circumstances’ were as rigid as fate, as immutable as a meteor or the trembling earth beneath our feet. In reality these circumstances are convenient shorthand for the way in which we relate to one another. In order to make it yet more comfortable we employ words of foreign origin, so that we might better obscure the source of the noun through the use of a verb. Speaking then of the state, we regard this word as nothing more than a certain civil-legal construction, existing only at the discretion of our will. This concession to comfort is a great sign of our common understanding, which wouldn’t be possible without this materialization of the fluidity and spirituality of relations. Yet, it is a curse for the attainment of knowledge, because we mistake a mere representation for reality; and so it is a major curse for the type of understanding necessary for the establishment of just human relations in society.”

Social Relations
Author:Gustav Landauer
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“As people find the balance with online and in-person socialization, the social net will enhance their lives and bring greater understanding to the world. People will maintain an ‘inner circle’ of relationships that will primarily be in person, while staying connected with people around the world through various forms of the social net. This will allow the average person to gain a greater understanding of the world from the eyes of other average people from different countries and cultures. Governments will need to adjust to this new world society.” —Tom Golway 2010”

Social RelationsDigital SocietyHyperconnectivity
Author:Tom Golway
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“A new awareness of the integral role that social networks play in long-distance migration goes beyond traditional ‘rational-choice and decision-making models’ drawn from classical economics that content themselves with explaining migration as the outcome of a ‘cost-benefit analysis of the most favorable destination.’ According to recent theory, something more than the push and pull of differential labor markets, hunger, or the search for religious freedom sends people into long-distance emigration. Voluntary migrations do not depend merely on autonomous individuals weighing the costs and benefits of uprooting themselves. Rather, social networks and relationships bind uprooted people on to another like the links in a chain. ‘Chain migration’ is sustained from within, and indeed ‘can become self-perpetuating,’ as ‘each act of migration itself creates the social structure needed to sustain’ further migration. News of another’s good fortune in a distance place, information about unforeseen opportunities, invitations to follow in another’s migratory footsteps, or a familial obligation to do so—the long reach of social relations such as these are the incentive that draws people into exile in other lands and accounts for the enormous scale of some systems of international migration.”

SlaveryImmigrationSocial RelationsChain MigrationVoluntary Migration
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
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“The key factor is the commitment required to make relationships work. When people are raised in a community that they cannot easily escape, they do what our ancestors have done for millions of years: They learn how to manage relationships, and how to manage themselves and their emotions in order to keep those precious relationships going. There are certainly many online communities that have found ways to create strong interpersonal commitments and a feeling of belonging. but in general, when children are raised in multiple mutating networks where they don't need to use their real names and they can quit with the click of a button, they are less likely to learn such skills.”

RelationshipsCommunityEvolutionary PsychologySocial AnxietySocial RelationsMental Development
Book:The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness
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“…overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world-are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.”

RelationshipsCommunityEvolutionary PsychologySocial AnxietySocial RelationsMental Development
Book:The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness
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“Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and- as I will show-unsuitable for children and adolescents. Succeeding socially in that universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness-perpetually-to managing what became their online brand. This was now necessary to gain acceptance from peers, which is the oxygen of adolescence, and to avoid online shaming, which is the nightmare of adolescence. Gen Z teens got sucked into spending many hours of each day scrolling through the shiny happy posts of friends, acquaintances, and distant influencers.”

RelationshipsCommunityTeensEvolutionary PsychologySocial AnxietySocial RelationsGen Z2010Mental DevelopmentWoke Generation
Book:The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness
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