I love people.
People bond by love, yet the pattern of loves, the fabric of society is the cultures.

Some authors claim that sex is the only social glue. Well, it’s not. Love is. If they were right then I would always think about sex, which I often do, yet it is far from always. I am not an animal although animal instincts are within me. But there’s more.

The layer above the shear instinctual fabric is self-recognition. This layer enables me to observe myself. The result of this is that my behaviour depends on what I observe about my behaviour. This creates an infinite loop that very quickly leads to intelligent behaviour. Machines cannot copy that. Not ever. Machines only mimic intelligence, and they do so as an extension of their creators, aka humans.

Animals do show intelligent behaviour, however their intelligence only shows in collective behaviour, not in individual animals.

People are the only organisms that are capable of individualised self-reflection which is a direct consequence of our prefrontal cortex, an organ that only developed fully in people.

Yet people also exhibit collective behaviour. This behaviour is another distinct layer of intelligence. This layer is culture.

Vuk Čosić told me a couple of weeks ago, that when cultures meet, mix or clash, what happens is an interchange of symmetries. This was what he found out in his diploma two decades ago. Take a symetric symbol, like a star. A star symbol can have different forms and different symetries. Stars can differ in the number of spikes, extension of spikes, regularity of the former and latter, patternisation of stars in starfields, materials used to make them, colours, ornamentation, even irregularities, and on and on.

But let’s just considers spikes. Stars start at three spikes, then four, five, six, seven, or any number thereof. Not all numbers are equal in terms of how often they occur across cultures.

I argue that the king of stars in our culture today is the five-spikes star, the pentagram.

Why?

I don’t know, yet I infer that the pentagram didn’t occur in all cultures at the same time, yet that in originated somewhere and then it started spreading. Today, the pentagram is the most commonly used state symbol around the world. Just remember the flags. Pentagram occurs in the flags of USA, China, Russia, Brazil, Turkey, and many more. It is even more common in heraldics, you find it almost everywhere.

However pentagram is far from unique. It is only an idea created and distributed by the incredible intelligence of cultures. Like so many other incredibly strong, persistent and vibrant ideas, contained within symetries, patterns and the fabrics of cultures. If anyone is ever to prove cultures are indid a layer of collective intelligence, symbolism is the place to look for. (which CG Jung did anyway)

And this is why it is so incredibly important to observe all the different cultures. If every culture fused with one overarching monoculture it would reduce the diversity of ideas contained within our collective behavious. Maybe this monopolisation of culture could serve a few individuals for a short period of time, yet in the long run it would be the biggest robbery of humanity in history.

Thus, respect other cultures, respect people, respect yourself.