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Social and International Synergy
Abstract
Lecturing at Barnard College in 1941, Ruth Benedict introduced a unique and important idea of synergy in a human social context. In this paper, striving towards a mathematical anthropology, we develop a complex dynamical model for her concept of social synergy, and discuss its application to international synergy, in the emerging planetary society of nations.
... We may understand such collections of dynamic centers of self-initiated activity, engaged in exchanges that benefit both individual goals and mutual interests, as synergistic communities, in the general sense suggested by Ruth Benedict, 28 and in the recent specific formulation by mathematician and dynamical systems theorist Ralph Abraham. 29 Benedict defined synergy as a situation in which "any act or skill that advantages the individual at the same time advantages the group." 30 She contrasted it with the opposite social situation in which "every act that advantages the individual is at the expense of others." ...
While the emergence of a planetary society unrolls, a backlash of neo‐nationalism is raising global alarm. Here we combine earlier works on international synergy and social fractals‐into a model for the new world disorder, and apply it to the transformation of the !Kung as an example.
This is the second progress report on the webometry project: acquisition of data regarding the density of links on the world-wide web (WWW). We illustrate the primary visualization strategy, the synergy matrix, in the case of a model subnet of nine nodes.
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