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The Fundamental Force Of People
The human world, like physics, can be reduced to four fundamental forces: culture, politics, war and business. That is also roughly the order of decreasing strength, increasing legibility and partial subsumption of the four forces. Here is a visualization of my mental model:
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Source : Venkatesh Rao : Ribbon Farm, via Stowe Boyd (http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/08/a-brief-history-of-the-corporation-1600-to-2100/)
It is a great article - click through and take a read. Since Stowe Boyd provided a link to this article in his feed, I now have added Ribbon Farm to my RSS Feed. But - as I read it, it reminded me of something I read on Wikipedia a couple of years ago. So I went to do some digging. This is what I came up with.
Bottom line - back in the 50s Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar developed this theory - which was then expanded in the 70s by Ravi Batra and then again since the 90s … Johan Galtung and Sohail Inayatullah - amongst others have taken a crack at building on the shoulders of giants.
This graphic is the key …
… where I see 4 specific roles for people …
- Warriors
- Intellectuals
- Acquisitors
- Laborers
Is it just me - or do you also recognize a merging of very similar ideas. Coincidence?
- Warriors map to War
- Acquisitors map to Business
- Intellectuals map to the Cultural / Political spectrum
oh - and the ‘laborer’ - translation the majority of humanity - well we are
- the voters
- the workers
- the soldiers
Something gotta change … #VRM