When doing an OpenSpeech (see my presentation at Ottobrunn Grammar School on May, 20th, about “community – people – society”), I started by asking my audience to just think about the term community. I told them to take a moment and let the brain associate it with other terms and then to tell us all what terms might be grouped around it.
I was literally bombarded with replies. And one young man among the senior high school students simply said:
There can only be a community where there are “masses of people”!
Isn’t that a stroke of genius? Indeed, a feeling of belonging in social systems, a society and all it means can only grow where there is one or several masses of people. Do these masses of people constantly change and constitute themselves anew, too?
The term “masses of people” suggests that society can only work if there is such a thing as wisdom of the mass or swarm intelligence. Actually, the concept of “masses of people” explains why there must be social systems and why society can change all the time.
And we are only part of a mass of people. We love or hate our mass, and once in a while, we desert it and join a new one. The concept makes things a lot easier. I would like to thank the student I do not know and inventor of the term “masses of people”.
RMD
(Translated by EG)