Science is just beginning to get some insight into a phenomenon called "active strength", where the strength of a system of parts isn't "in" the parts, or "in" the way they are connected, but "in" the way they dynamically change pressure on each other in response to some external stress. A thin Wikipedia article on Active Structures with one links is here.
This concept is subtle, but is as important to understand as the concepts of "dynamic stability" and "dynamic control", which also seem to our intuition that they shouldn't work, but do, and, in fact, they work superbly. You need to understand these concepts to really get the difference between rigor and rigidity. We want structures we build to be rigorous and not fall down, but that turns out to mean they have to be somewhat flexible, and cannot be rigid. (There are no Oak trees in hurricane country, only palm trees that bend with the wind.)
There are whole institutes that study "Active Materials", such as the "Active Materials Lab" at UCLA. What becomes really fascinating is when active materials are ocmbined to make active structures. See, for example the "Active Structures Lab" in Brussels.
One example of an active structure is your bones. I worked at the Biomechanics Lab of the VA Hospital in Cleveland at Wade Park, helping design artificial hip joints, long ago. Researcher had assumed that bone was, you know, dead stuff like steel, so they had measured how strong it was, which was mostly what I did with my lathe and Instron machine. Then, they designed artificial joints based on that data. The joints mostly either bent or broke. Oops.
It turns out that bone is an active material, and is piezo-electric. When it is under stress, the body sends electrical signals to the bone that cause it to shift shape slightly, but enough to make it much stronger for that instant stress. This trick lets the body have it both ways -- light bones, so we can move, but really strong exactly when and where strength is needed.
It's as if the door to weakness is guarded by some sort of "pong" paddle that simply moves back and forth to block incoming hockey pucks, without requiring that the door be "solid" or even there most of the time. If you go look for a "door", you won't find it. It's like your "lap" -- only there sometimes. It's like a bridge that is mostly empty space except for a little bit just under your car that is extra strong and moves along like a shadow under you.
We don't know how many other places this design pattern is used in nature, but I suspect it is quite a few, because it is very efficient and economical. You get both strength and lightness.
Tall buildings and some other buildings are now being built with active strength concepts and they actually change shape and pressure to deal with high winds coming from one side or the other. Really tall buildings now have a huge weight at the top, that can glide in any direction, that is driven by hydraulic pistons and counteracts vibrations and sway in the wind.
So there are books like "Vibration Control of Active Structures" that examine how to use these techniques to damp out waves and vibrations which otherwise would weaken or shatter the structure.
The theory carries over just as well into dynamic information structures in computing, and dynamic social structures that could weaken or collapse, that we want to make extremely strong even though they are sparse and thin and lightweight. Even "control", viewed in the right dimensions, is an entity that we want to "hold together" and not "fall part" or "lose the center", but we want control by management or government to be as "light" and "sparse" as possible to get the job done.
For example, the US Air Traffic Control system is designed to keep planes from running into each other, but within those constraints, pilots can do pretty much whatever they want to. Pilots can say - "No, that doesn't work for me. How about this instead" and get different clearances. It's the pilots that can see out the window and know what's going on in the plane and weather around them, not the "controllers". This is another example of a hybrid vertical loop, where the controllers issue "orders" and "clearances" and yet the pilots can give information that changes the "orders". It is actually run from the bottom up, and just consolidated from the top down. Controllers only redirect traffic when they are force to by weather, for example - they never tell you that you don't want to fly to Miami, you should think about flying to Memphis this time of year.
So, what would an active-strength social structure look and act like? How could you recognize one if you saw it? How could you see where active-strength would help.
Well, for one thing, if you try to push it over, it will rally and push back on you, not crumble and flee. In war, some cultures are incredibly strong at fighting back in spirit as well as in body. Whatever this active spirit is, it is the key to their strength, and war strategists focus primarily on how to break the spirit of the opponent, because the military collapse always follows from that.
So, the flip side of that is figuring out what it takes to make our own spirit strong.
This "spirit" thing or concept is important. Whatever a "spirit" is, in this sense, it describes what holds the team together against all odds and keeps it running at or beyond its capacity.
"Team spirit" is more real in terms of changing outcomes than just certain color clothes and cheers.
Similarly, doctors know that some patients have a "strong spirit" and can survive trauma or burdens that would simply kill patients with "weak spirit." Many doctors have seen at least one patient simply decide to "let go" and proceed to die. What's that about? It's also really frustrating because the strong spirited patients tend to complain a lot and are a "lot of trouble" for the nurses.
People have the capacity to be very strong together, but they don't always use it. It's hard to understand, and you can't "see" whatever it is we call "spirit" directly, and yet it seems to be a word that has a scientifically measurable outcome. I'm using the term "spirit" here more like the active sense of something, not like a "ghost".
One thing is clear - opponents or people with no spirit simply crumble and crumple under pressure or duress. Whatever this spirit thing is, it affects biomedical outcomes as well as social-level outcomes, in measurable ways.
Further reading :
A Wiki on "active architecture" you can participate in is here. Active Architecture in the meaning of a building aware of and responsive to its occupants is here.
A much more technical look at the subject would be "An Active Architecture Approach to Dynamic System Co-evolution" by Morrison, et. al., which is about the conceptual "architecture" of the information structures that happen inside computers - and how to make they adaptive and dynamic and capable of learning and evolving but not collapsing.
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