The "most extreme" followers of Heraclitus said that it is impossible to fix a name to anything. - Howard Bloom

By the nineteenth century... new circumstances called for new conformity enforcers... The government locked you in a house of penitence—a penetentiary—where your feelings of remorse would theoretically pummel you without cease.

The greatest human evils are not those that individuals perform in private, the tiny transgressions against some arbitrary social standard we call sins. The ultimate evils are the mass murders that occur in revolution and war, the large-scale savageries that arise when one agglomeration of humans tries to dominate another: the deeds of the social group. ...only group efforts can save us from the sporadic insanities of the group.

Primordial communities of bacteria were elaborately interwoven by communication links. ...These turned a colony into a collective processor... The resulting learning machine was so ingenious that Eshel Ben-Jacob has called its modern bacterial counterpart a "creative web."