Eric Temple Bell Quotes

Just as the mind emerges from the actions of individual neurons and their cooperation, the success of an organization emerges not only from its individual participants, but also from the interplay between them.

A crowd, whether it be a dangerous mob, or an amiably joyous gathering at a picnic is not a community. It has a mind, but no institutions, no organizations, no coherent unity, no history, no traditions.

Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups.

Now, when an American has an idea, he directly seeks a second American to share it. If there be three, they elect a president and two secretaries. Given four, they name a keeper of records, and the office is ready for work; five, they convene a general meeting, and the club is fully constituted.

If the process of life is about moving toward increased complexity and organization, a sort of sublime unfolding of greater and greater self-organizing systems, then we're actually doing pretty well.

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.

I'm interested in complexity, in the mathematical sense, as well as the idiomatic sense. The idea of emergence - that it's possible for complex patterns to arise out of many simple interactions - is fascinating.

The world is deterministic, but it's chaotic and emergent.

Closed systems run down and get more chaotic over time. Always get better by being 'open' to outside energy and templates of better ways to function.

And so from that, I've always been fascinated with the idea that complexity can come out of such simplicity.

The nature of man is intricate. The objects of society are of the greatest complexity and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature or to the quality of his affairs.

It is not possible to assume that a world carried on by division of labor and authority, can be governed by universal opinions in the whole population.

Any organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is "flat" and in which all members are equal.

If you take 10,000 chimpanzees and cram them together into Wembley Stadium or the Houses of Parliament, you will get chaos. But if you take 10,000 people who have never met before, they can co-operate and create amazing things.

Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.

Society is not a mere sum of individuals. Rather, the system formed by their association represents a specific reality which has its own characteristics... The group thinks, feels, and acts quite differently from the way in which its members would were they isolated. If, then, we begin with the individual, we shall be able to understand nothing of what takes place in the group.

We get to the point then with modern science where you could almost say that modern science is the art of describing those systems so crude in their structure that they are not subject to temporal variables.

A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people.

The more tightly packed the group, the greater the need for strict social ranks and orders.

I think the next century will be the century of complexity.

Sociology should... be thought of as a science of action-of the ultimate common value element in its relations to the other elements of action.

I think sociologists are among the best at thinking about emergence, of thinking about the ways that the society is more than the sum of the individuals. And I've found that much of the wisest writing on human social nature comes from sociology and anthropology, not from my own field of social psychology.

My take is that the kind of complexity which says we can always generate complexity from simple interactions following for example rules.

We are a social animal, power only exists in a social sense, we have to work in groups.

Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.