Title: The Ripple Effect. The Major Consequences of Minor Actions | by Brent Cooper | The Abs-Tract Organization | Medium
Headings: The Ripple Effect
The Ripple Effect
The Major Consequences of Minor Actions
Stochastic Terrorism: Triggering the shooters.
(This update is to resolve some ambiguity.) The person who actually plants the bomb or assassinates the public official…

Content: Normal Long
This is only becoming truer as global integration increase and technology shrinks temporal and spatial aspects of the globe. Every individual shares culpable for problems we co-create and the burden of living together. We need to take responsibility for ripple effects we send out, causing the current crises, even though its difficult to see how. As Ulrich Beck writes,
“who in a legally relevant sense ‘causes’ pollution, or a financial crises, is difficult to determine, since these events are the result of interactions among many individuals.” — Ulrich Beck
Taking responsibility begins with a sociological imagination, and continues with expanding ones awareness from their physical reach to the entire earth. It is virtually impossible to disassociate ourselves from the negative effects and byproducts of our levels of consumption and destruction, but this abstract metaphor takes us a long way to becoming aware and finding ways to critique our own relationship to the world. It’s worth mentioning too that we can’t talk about ripple effects without also talking about the butterfly effect, tipping points, and negative externalities. The ripple effect should be distinguished from the ‘butterfly effect’, a term from chaos theory, which stipulates that a small action in a complex system can be amplified and produce large effects elsewhere in the system. The ripple effect may have more relative application in considering the aggregate effect of individual actions. Therefore, global problems such as pollution, poverty, corruption, systemic ignorance, which are caused by no primary actor, can be explained by the ripple effect, as based on the aggregate empowerment of individuals.