How does a group of individuals become a community? Let’s explore emergence, entropy, and percolation theory—and learn what helps communities reach critical mass.
The idea of emergence is fascinating. It’s the point where a bunch of “things” become “something.” It gets to the core of human existentialism, I think. What are we? Who are we? Where did we come from? What are we becoming? Where are we going?
If you’ve never heard of the idea, it’s like this: Let’s look at it like a continuum. On one end, you have the reduced parts. The bricks. The gears. The individual cells. On the other end, you have the complex system. The house. The clock. The living body. And somewhere between the reductionist perspective of the parts and the holism of the system, there’s a point where the system becomes… a system. A point where the parts begin to become functionally organized, or self-organized.
It’s at that point on the continuum where the magic happens. Something wholly new emerges.
And we see it everywhere. Atoms become molecules. Cells become organisms. Birds become a flock that turns in the sky like a single creature. Even inanimate things do it. Snowflakes. Sand dunes. Hurricanes. It would seem that everything in this reality struggles toward organization. And at the same time, nature is constantly pulling everything back toward its fundamental parts. Houses rot. Bodies age. Empires fall. Leave anything alone long enough and it returns to the pile it came from.
That’s entropy. And it always wins. Eventually.
But if we pull back the curtain, we see something even more interesting. A physicist named Ilya Prigogine won a Nobel Prize for showing that organized systems don’t survive by fighting entropy. They survive by keeping energy moving through them. A hurricane only exists as long as it has warm water to feed on. A cell only lives as long as it keeps eating.
Cut off the flow, and the whole thing falls apart. Order, it turns out, has to be fed. Continuously renewed.
And I’ll be honest. When I look at that, I see an intelligence. Not in the hurricane. A hurricane isn’t thinking about anything. I see it in the algorithm of reality. The rules seem to be written so that, under the right conditions, the parts want to come together as a whole.
Intelligent design, if you will.
And every system has its own parameters. Water freezes at one temperature and boils at another. A crowd tips into panic at some point nobody can predict. But every system, given enough of the right ingredients, reaches a critical mass of sorts. A point where it stops being parts and starts being a whole. A system.
Network scientists have a way of picturing this. They call it percolation. Percolation theory describes how small, disconnected pieces in a network or random medium suddenly connect to form a giant, system-wide cluster when a critical threshold is reached. Like a field full of people where you start connecting random individuals together with string. For a long time, nothing much happens. You get a couple over here. A little cluster over there. But, before you know it, one giant web has formed—linking almost everybody in the field. No single string looks any different from the one before it. But, at some point, it became a web… a connected whole. And that point is called EMERGENCE. (Emergence is the process where a complex system gains new properties, patterns, or behaviors that its individual parts do not possess on their own. In short, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.)
Which brings me to community.
I’ve spent years doing community building of the bottom-up social infrastructure kind. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that getting a group of people to that point of emergence is hard. Really, really hard. People are busy. People are tired. And most of us, if we’re honest, will only move as far from ourselves as we feel we need to.
So we show up. We host the meetings. We cook the meals. We send the reminders. And a lot of the time, it feels like nothing is happening. But maybe that’s the percolation problem. Maybe we’re adding strings and just can’t see the web forming yet. I don’t think the science gives us a formula. But it does give us a few clues.
Ice usually needs something to form around—a speck of dust, a scratch on the glass. Communities seem to need that too. Not a crowd, but a handful of people who already trust each other. Five or ten is plenty. And the strings have to run between the people, not just to the organizer. If everybody knows me but nobody knows each other, that’s not a community. That’s a wagon wheel. And I can tell you from experience, the hub gets tired.
The connections also have to be easy. Nobody bonds at a mixer. People bond by working side by side. Serving a meal. Trading hours in a time bank. Fixing somebody’s fence. And the energy has to keep flowing. A community is a lot like that hurricane. It only holds together as long as something keeps moving through it. Regular gatherings. Shared meals. Real needs met by real neighbors. Real successes. Stop feeding it and it all goes right back to being a pile of parts.
The good news is that we don’t need to do it all at once. We just need to make enough connections… over time.
So if you’re out there building something and it feels like you’re getting nowhere… keep tying strings. You might be one connection away from the moment everything snaps into place (emergence). You may not even see the moment that it happens. The moment that a community emerges.
But you will feel it. And the others will too.
Join us in making the world a better place. You’ll be glad that you did. Cheers, friends.
