Lessons in Pluribus

There is no ethically legitimate shortcut to population-scale change that bypasses population-scale learning.

Ideas that posit change propagating from a small enlightened subset to transform the many—whether framed as morphogenetic fields, 100th Monkey transference, spiritual awakenings,  or  “miracles”—share a common flaw: they erase agency. They imagine that human transformation can happen without participation, consent, or learning. This has been the fallacy of every cult and religion.

Fiction like Pluribus makes this visible by stripping the euphemisms away. When people are “changed” without knowing, choosing, or learning, their lives lose moral meaning. Character, responsibility, and agency become irrelevant artifacts—reformatted at will by others’ intentions.  What is the value of a human life if it can be wiped of its learned ways of being and behaviorally transformed without consent or the agency to consent? Once seen clearly, this is not hopeful; it’s profoundly unethical.

Real change scales only through learning because learning is the only process that:

• preserves agency,
• integrates understanding with choice,
• and produces durable, self-correcting behavior.

Edge work—personal enlightenment, consciousness-raising, exemplary living—has intrinsic value for those doing it – and that is great. But when it is presented as the strategy for solving population-level crises, it becomes a dangerous distraction. It substitutes inspiration for infrastructure, symbolism for transmission, and faith for pedagogy.

Our deepest failures—authoritarianism, ecological collapse, inequality, healthcare breakdown—are not failures of belief or intention or even knowledge. They are failures to learn together at the scale of our failures.

There is no miracle step. There is only learning—or manipulation. And only one of those is compatible with human dignity.

Our challenges, Trump/Maga, the climate, environment, inequalities, healthcare, on and on… are all population scale challenges that can only be resolved by population scale learning.

Regulatory containment fails not because regulation is conceptually weak, but because it is politically starved. Awakening (mindfulness) efforts remain marginal relative to the scale and force of mass-mediated population conditioning, so they fail to generate the population-level agency needed to counter lobbying power. Alternative provisioning builds local relief but lacks sufficient visibility, scale, or narrative force to alter collective consciousness or political leverage. As a result, none of the three (historical change) currents can independently accumulate the political capital required to intelligently respond to the challenges we face. What is required is the emergence of a qualitatively different form of power—one that operates at the level of mass agency formation itself, not merely policy, awareness, or parallel supply.  Mass agency can only come from mass learning.

“E pluribus unum” is not descriptive; it is aspirational. It does not name what is. It names what must be learned into. It points to our population-scale learning challenge.

• Pluribus is the given: plurality, difference, fragmentation, lived divergence.
• Unum is not a miracle outcome but a coordination achievement.
• The connective tissue is not belief, identity, or authority — it is learning together.

There just isn’t any substitute for a more learning oriented population. Believing otherwise, believing one’s beliefs trump learning together, is what created the messes we are in.

 

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Tangent Migrations – Artificially Conventionalized Learning
“I am” and the Power of Verbal Self-Reflexivity
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Learning YOU
Learning to be Human
In the Beginning Was the Word
Children of the Code Language Resources
Everything depends on learning. Learning to believe otherwise is learning disabling.