Human beings are not quite herd animals as history has shown us over and over.  Yet despite the repeating evidence, frequently a government will try to frame policy around tactics based on the assumption of humans travel across the prairies and mountains in predictable herds of gullible habits. Occasionally and lasting only briefly (say one or two lifetimes) we will emulate some primitive instinct as we are doing in 2025 and divide up into herds like, for example, conservative and progressive. As a divided set of national herds we still all fly the same flag except neither side puts much real stock in the flag. This is devaluing a flag is obvious in the cities and country sides of an America laboring under the current alpha president aspiring to harvest the herds. This almost universal disregard for the values of Old Glory may also be because the original American flag was a primal protest symbol against kings and dictators and the demands of conformity.

Earlier in this writer’s career, a technology chief for a state said computer programers love an autocracy and conformity in society for their work of computer programming and design   Diversity and pesky unpredictability create too many variables.  No surprise that we now have a government in the technological present that has adopted the “my way or the highway” approach.  My way or the highway is not so different from the  long standing much failed parental approach for dealing with teenagers. Like the teen roaming the streets in the late hours searching for critical identity in the dark, the American population is splintering into unanticipated  conflicted diversity. Humanity is many things but not a conforming herd in the long term.  In Russia, China, and now the United States governments are trying to weed out of the garden of humanity certain innate development patterns of mood and expression through censorship. These moods or expressions don’t fit their agenda. This is usually the phase of conflict where a family goes into counseling before either a parent or child burn the house down.  But there seem to be no counselors for governments that find the dynamic identities of their population in the way of their aspirations for themselves (almost always) and the herd they want to recreate in their own image. The universal message may be for these authoritarians should be never mistake yourself for God.

Modest Proposal for Good.

Inside the word ‘decision’ is the word choice. Inside the word ‘human’ is agency and efficacy. Inside the word ‘good’ is love.  Love, though, requires choice and agency so it seems a closed loop.  Humans have this brain that stores and organizes memories that live atop a furnace of aspiring individual efficacy.  Forming community despite individuality is a collective choice as well as responsibility made freely made by individuals in the round. Community is the work of realizing you and your memories are not alone and cannot possibly survive alone. Community begins ‘wherever two or three are gathered‘ and the Christians out there should be able to fill in the rest of that phrase.  Whenever two or three don’t gather and community breaks down, an overly ambitious alpha human is likely to make a run to form a conforming herd of breakaways.  Good is gathering, actually choosing love and interdependence and doing the work.  These alpha governments will not stand long against pesky humanity’s agency in community.  But oh the price we might have to pay in the reformation.