Executive Summary

• The approaching frenzy of tipping points
• Why collapse is already in progress
• Choosing emergence-y over emergency
• My personal plan

If you have not yet read Part 1: Welcome To Easter Island, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

A tipping point is a critical moment in time when the old gives way to the new, suddenly and irreversibly.

When Easter Island flopped over from a forest ecology to a grassland ecology is an example.  There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with grassland ecology, it’s just very different than a forest ecology.  Each has a very complex arrangement, it’s just that a forest is far more complex and has thousands of different components such as monkeys and birds and snakes and insects and plants/shrubs/vines/trees that don’t exist on a grassland.

In sociology a tipping point is when a group of people quickly and dramatically changes its behavior by adopting a previously fringe practice.  In Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point (which I found very influential on my thinking, by the way) a company was suddenly deluged with orders for Hush Puppies, those distinctly 70’s era crepe soled fashion disasters.

How did this happen?  As curious marketing sorts always trying to unlock the consumer’s mind, they traced the ‘outbreak’ back to a single district in NYC where a single influential person walked by a single secondhand store and saw a single pair of Hush Puppies on display.  They bought them, wore them, and then their circle of acquaintances wore them, and a Tipping Point event occurred.

The lesson was don’t try to unlock ‘the consumer’ as if that were a monolithic thing – some people are far more influential than others.

So too with SARS-CoV-2 some people are super spreaders and they account for the vast majority of the outbreaks. Most people infect less than one other person, one woman in South Korea infected 5,000 other people.

Dunbar’s number (148, often rounded up to 150) is the “point beyond which members of any social group lose their ability to function effectively in social relationships.”  Below that tipping point and you can make sense of all the relationships in your life.