“Humans are a peculiarly unusual animal. One of the primary analogies that represents some of our inborn qualities in Nature is hive organisms, as they are one of the few creatures on land that assemble something resembling our cities (though corals might be another analogy in the waters).

There are a vast plethora of ‘problems’ with ou species, but one of them is that we are divided — internally, personally, cognitively and emotionally. Our societies reflect this conflict. We may imagine that the tensions resulting from these divisions are the origins of many of our best and most terrifying qualities.

Our cultures are not intelligent. And, because of this, few individuals will be exposed to models of intelligence that actually result in something resembling the term. But for our kind of animal, it strikes me as likely that the actual intelligence or lack of it is not so much in individuals (though we may usefully examine them or look there for it), but rather… in our »networks.

We are a network animal (this should be obvious as nearly all of our social constructs are networks/networking. Part of what we may take this to mean is that if our networks are misguided, their errors and the results of them will be expressed by the individuals participating in them, as is natural.

The message here is simple: until we become capable (and this must be our purpose in participation in human networks) of discovering what actual intelligence looks like and is concerned with, we will inherit and express the diseases resulting from the failure to establish intelligent priorities and forms of human networking. Our societies are a conglomerate of commercial and political idiocies, and until and unless we form and sustain intelligent human networks… this will be our primary ‘inheritance’ from them: devastating ignorance.

But it is our nature to long for and strive toward intelligent associations and social structures. One challenge is that the existing cultures and societies must resist or transform such attempts in order to ‘survive’. But they are not yet alive. In terms of our social networks, they are crude emulations of features common in nature’s networks. And it is nature we must return to if we are to become able to understand and emulate the actual basis of our real or possible intelligence.”

— an anonymous informant