EMOTIONS IN SOCIETIES: THE DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD

“Emotions are … a double-edged sword; they bring us together but they also push us apart … Emotions arouse us to the point of being willing to tear societies apart in riots and revolutions.” Jonathan Turner, 2011

How are emotions involved in the collapse of societies? I co-lead a group that is asking this question. It is a System Dynamics (SD) research group that works on quantitative models of history. Some of you may not be familiar with SD. Yet, if you read the book Systemic Coaching (Hall, Gambardella, 2012), you already have a taste of SD. In that book, we used diagrams from SD to express the feedback structure and dynamics of each client’s problem.

My research group creates computer simulation models to better understand how history unfolds. Our current theme is studying how societies collapse. Like Jared Diamond, author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), we also want to know what makes societies prosper.