A common idea is that societies or groups are the sum of their parts. Like adding millions of identical…

A common idea is that societies or groups are the sum of their parts. Like adding millions of identical points, to create a whole. Or instead we say ‘the whole is greater than the sum of the parts’. But neither of those ideas explains groups, of any size. /1 https://t.co/yHedumpO25

Any crowd picture shows the actual truth. Look at the faces. Every one completely individual. People act for their own individual reasons. There is no group mind. The fallacy of much thinking about groups, societies and politics is that individuals and groups are two things. /2 https://t.co/ryJKaNeR0w

They’re not. The secret key here is to stop trying to make wholes from parts, by pre-defining the people as parts. Each person is already a whole. By which I mean you don’t get a group or a society by adding up lots of individual characteristics, as an aggregate. /3 https://t.co/DWQFznRaH8

Each person in that crowd has a view of how the WHOLE society works. Not one-millionth of a view, and adding another 999,999 views then gives you a society. Groups of people of whatever size coordinate to act as a group when these *whole* views overlap in some way. /4 https://t.co/j3n2AOv6Oe

It’s more like set theory, than counting. Each person is a set, and that set is all of society, from the perspective or viewpoint of that person. When they act together, each person in the group does so for their own reasons, which in turn are created by their assessment of…/5 https://t.co/DF5iL0MDl3

…how the decided action fits in their whole big picture view of how society works. Nothing is added up here. A group is not the sum of individuals, there are no parts or wholes in that way. We are each a universe in ourselves, all of reality refracted through the…/6 https://t.co/uMJlIlEGSR

…individuality that is us. That’s why there are no individuals or groups. Individuals are all of reality already, seen through a particular viewpoint. And groups don’t add people up, they’re overlapping narratives shared between all of these unique worldviews. /7 https://t.co/Hhgv5xgSUE

Each person a monad, as philosophers say, not a point. This matters because in our politics for example, we’re always playing tug of war between individual and group focus. But if that distinction isn’t even real, it changes politics hugely. Most of the battles between…/8 https://t.co/nQ0YUPVTOu

…Left and Right turn out to be based on a fiction. Maybe more on that another time. /end https://t.co/roasCXiyiW