The Hidden Power Of Relationships.
Relationships create everything. This is true whether we are talking about birth, the relationship between our parents, or the relationship of energy and mass in the fundamental physics of existence. Everywhere we look, relationships are fundamental to our reality.
Of course, our brains do not burden us with the details. What we see is simplified to serve our everyday needs. It is like riding a bicycle. We learn to balance without ever knowing how the physics of angular momentum keeps the bike stable.
However, details are critical when we want to do more than ride a bicycle. Understanding how things work using the laws of physics and the science of networks makes bigger things possible --- like putting people on the moon.
Understanding our complex social networks is essential for a sustainable, productive, resilient community.
The networks connecting us are active players. This is important because a community is a living system with its own collective beliefs, built-in responses, and reinforcing feedback loops. Networks that are not supportive make it exceedingly difficult to "fix" the individual without simultaneously improving the network.
Consider the growing possibility of pharmaceuticals capable of overcoming the biological barriers experienced by substance use disorder patients. Even if this becomes dependable, substance use alters the individual's internal reality. Mind-altering substances quite literally alter the mind and once broken, things do not go back to where they were.
The social networks supporting the individual have also changed in response to their behaviors, meaning re-integration is not automatic.
Finally, all physical or social systems experience inertia, where things try to be as they were, and the difference is slow to be accommodated.
None of this makes sense until we see the networks we live within and fully realize they are more potent than any individual. Even when an individual addiction is “cured,” the effects with the network must catch up before stability can be achieved.
It takes a network to see a network: social media is an excellent example of the power of a network perspective. While enrolling individuals in their services, social media maintains a graph of relationships and their intersections with other individuals. This is exceptional information, but social media becomes even more potent because users can directly observe the behavior of these networks within their applications.
This ability of social media to observe and study human dynamics is easily the most crucial capability we need now. Nothing even close to this operates outside the for-profit sphere. Solving today's problems, especially those created or enhanced by social media's social system expertise, requires equally capable networks to improve people's lives.
Curandi is working to connect social system agencies and providers into networks capable of better understanding social problems and using that knowledge to implement real change in the systemic dysfunction that fuels society's problems.