What shape would you say is the more typical for how groups of people organise?
A circle, or concentric circles. Maybe, I’m no so sure about this, you could compare it with a flock of birds flying in pattern, where the one bird changes direction as the one next to him moves. There no one leader, circumstances decide who make the first move, and it expands outward based on proximity, and comes back again from other sources.
Or a triangle, or piramid. The typical hierarchy. One leader takes the decisions, maybe somewhat informed by the ones closest in line, but the rest have to follow his direction. There’s no real back and forth.
It depends heavily on the the circumstances - the more perceived danger, the more hierarchical. It also depends on the type/purpose of group, of course - a family is arranged differently to a fan club or a police force.
Taking large (national-level) groups, under non-urgent situations, the culture is extremely relevant. The Power Distance index corresponds to how accepting a culture is of hierarchy and inequality: clearlycultural.com/geert-ho … nce-index/
Hofstede’s cultural dimension work is used widely as a pragmatic guide for international business and management, and corresponds pretty well to my experience.
“What shape would you say is the more typical for how groups of people organise?”
A spectrum… two polarities - Alpha male and Omega male (or female?), and between them, the entire herd.
What is stronger than the Alpha male falls off the spectrum, as does what is weaker than the Omegamale.
The omega-male (ω) is not identified with weakness. It is, in fact, a strategic difference, as both work within existing and emerging power structures.
People organise precisely without shape. Spontaneous, disconnected, a horizontal ocean of spiral whirlpools and merging and diverging currents set within a vertical multiplicity of the same. Shape betrays a rigidity and fixedness which is lacking of necessity in organic compositions. Order exists, yes, but an organic order of flow and flux, of chaos. The structures we see are the result of our distance apart from these essences, just as “cause and effect” is the result of a perceptual distance which cannot see the continuum nature of ‘time’ and ‘space’, instead perceiving only great jumps as if instantaneously.
If we were ever able to truly see the organisation of any herd structure it would look incomprehensible to us. In truth the richness and complex interdimensionality of even simple organic relations is imperceptible to us, let alone that of an overall organic system. We mistakenly classify group dynamics into linear motions and fixed numerical relations, but it is the organic which expressly opposes these exact types of static a-temporal and bounded singularities.
. It’s some 200 km south of Leiden.
