Synchronicity Cambray

While the pathway from communal identity to Athenian democracy
had many elements, a crucial step came at the end of the sixth
century BCE. For the following account I draw upon Manville and
Ober. 10 In the face of the loss of the democratic process 11 with the
invasion of the Spartans in 508 BCE, Cleisthenes used his visionary
leadership in the surprising Athenian victory over the Spartans to
institute a series of reforms. For the purposes of this text, the relevant
aspect was Cleisthenes’ revision of the deme, the system of membership
in a local neighborhood (by this period every male Athenian over
the age of eighteen was eligible to become a citizen by being formally
voted into the local deme).
Now Cleisthenes redrew the demes, redistributing by lottery the
entire population into ten new “tribes.” These new deme were deliberately
made up of individuals drawn from each of the major areas of
the activity of the city (geographic and economic), especially farmers
(agrarian villages), seafarers (coastal regions), and merchants (urban
center). These ten composite units were then organized in such a
fashion as to form the military and civic services, and their representatives
formed the overall general assembly. Because of the large size
of the assembly (the general body was a council of five hundred) and
the short terms of office for most posts, most citizens had multiple
opportunities over a lifetime to be directly involved in the political life
of the city, to the point that “politics became the dominant element in
the life of the community.” 12
The rearrangement and engagement of individuals into a network
of networks to create complex wholes that have the capacity for selforganization
strongly indicates this society was built on an intuition
of what has been mentioned throughout this text as scale-free networks.
Recall that one of their key features is emergent properties:
individual interactions that combine, especially within a competitive
environment, to form a linked network that has new features unforeseeable
from the perspective of the interactions alone. The properties
of the whole transcend any and all of the individuals and their
interactions. These types of networks are highly robust to a variety
of attacks, although knocking out major centers, “hubs,” can cripple
them. 13 Strikingly adaptive, they exhibit many features that suggest
Cultural Synchronicities ( 9 )